The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are.
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By the eighteenth century, the European style of using utensils had become somewhat standardized, with the knife in the right hand cutting off food and sometimes also pushing pieces of it onto the fork, which conveyed it to the mouth. Since the first forks were straight-tined, there was no front or back to them, but shortcomings of this ambiguous design soon became evident. Whether food was skewered on or placed across the tines of the fork, the fork had to be brought to a near-horizontal position to enter the mouth with the least chance of its tines’ piercing the roof of the mouth or the food’s falling off. With slightly curved tines, and with food placed on their convex side, the fork handle did not have to be lifted so high to convey the food quickly and safely to the mouth. Furthermore, the arching tines enabled the fork to pierce a piece of meat squarely, yet curved out of the way so that diners could see clearly what they were cutting. By the middle of the eighteenth century, gently curving tines were standard on English forks, thus giving them distinct fronts and backs.
But the fork was a rare item in colonial America. According to one description of everyday life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first and only fork in the earliest days, carefully preserved in its case, had been brought over in 1630 by Governor Winthrop. In seventeenth-century America, “knives, spoons, and fingers, with plenty of napery, met the demands of table manners.” As the eighteenth century dawned, there were still few forks. Furthermore, since knives imported from England had ceased to come with pointed tips, they could not be employed to spear food and convey it to the mouth.
How the present American use of the knife and fork evolved does not seem to be known with certainty, but it has been the subject of much speculation. Without forks, the more refined colonists can be assumed to have handled a knife and spoon at the dinner table. Indeed, using an older, pointed knife and spoon, a “spike and spon,” to keep the fingers from touching food may have given us the phrase “spic and span” to connote a high standard of cleanliness. How the blunted spike and spon influenced today’s knife and fork has been suggested by the archaeologist James Deetz, who has written of Early American life in his evocative In Small Things Forgotten. (The phrase is taken from colonial probate records, where it referred to the completion of an accounting of an estate’s items by grouping together the small and trivial things whose individually intrinsic value did not warrant a separate accounting. Forks themselves would never have been lumped with “small things forgotten,” but still the way knives, forks, or spoons were actually used seems not to have been recorded.)
According to Deetz, in the absence of forks some colonists took to holding the spoon in the left hand, bowl down, and pressing a piece of meat against the plate so that they could cut off a bite with the knife in the right hand. Then the knife was laid down and the spoon transferred from the left to the generally preferred hand, being turned over in the process, to scoop up the morsel and transfer it to the mouth (the rounded back of a spoon being ill suited to pile food upon). When the fork did become available in America, its use replaced that of the spoon, and so the customary way of eating with a knife and spoon became the way to eat with a knife and fork. In particular, after having used the knife to cut, the diner transferred the fork from the left to the right hand, turning it over in the process, to scoop up the food for the mouth, for the spoonlike scooping action dictated that the fork have the tines curving upward. This theory is supported by the fact that when the four-tined fork first appeared in America it was sometimes called a “split spoon.” The action of passing the fork back and forth between hands, a practice that Emily Post termed “zigzagging” and contrasted to the European “expert way of eating,” persists to this day as the American style.
In America as elsewhere, however, well into the nineteenth century table manners and tableware remained far from uniform. Though “etiquette manuals appeared in unprecedented numbers,” as late as 1864 Eliza Leslie could still declare in her Ladies’ Guide to True Politeness and Perfect Manners that “many persons hold silver forks awkwardly, as if not accustomed to them.” Frances Trollope described among the diners on a Mississippi River steamboat in 1828 some “generals, colonels, and majors” who had “the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth.” And since the feeding knife was apparently blunt-tipped, the diners had to clean their teeth with pocket knives afterward. Just a generation later, the experiences of Mrs. Trollope’s son, Anthony, were quite different. Dining in a Lexington, Kentucky, hotel in 1861, he observed not officers but “very dirty” teamsters who nevertheless impressed him by being “less clumsy with their knives and forks … than … Englishmen of the same rank.”
On an American tour in 1842, Charles Dickens noted that fellow passengers on a Pennsylvania canal boat “thrust the broad-bladed knives and the two-pronged forks further down their throats than I ever saw the same weapons go before, except in the hands of a skilled juggler.” The growing use of the fork displaced the knife from the mouth, but the new fashion was not without its dissenters, who likened eating peas with a fork to “eating soup with a knitting needle.” With its multiplying tines and uses, however, the fork was to become the utensil of choice, and by the end of the nineteenth century a refined person could eat “everything with it except afternoon tea.” It was just such a menu of applications for a single utensil that led to specialized descendants like fish and pastry forks, as we shall see later in this book.
European and American styles of eating with knife and fork are not the only ways civilized human beings have solved the design problem of getting food from the table to the mouth. Indeed, as Jacob Bronowski pointed out, “A knife and fork are not merely utensils for eating. They are utensils for eating in a society in which eating is done with a knife and fork. And that is a special kind of society.” To this day, some Eskimos, Africans, Arabs, and Indians eat with their fingers, observing ages-old customs of washing before and after the meal. But even Westerners sometimes eat with their fingers. The American hamburger and hot dog are consumed without the aid of utensils, with the bun keeping the fingers from becoming greasy. Tacos may be less easy to eat, but the shell—reminiscent of the first food containers—keeps the greasier food from soiling the fingers, at least in principle. Such foods demonstrate alternative technological ways of achieving the same cultural objective.
In the Far East, chopsticks developed about five thousand years ago as extensions of the fingers. According to one theory of their origin, food was cooked in large pots, which held the heat long after everything was ready to be eaten. Hungry people burned their fingers reaching into the pot early to pull out the choicest-looking morsels, and so they sought alternatives. Grasping the morsels with a pair of sticks protected the fingers, or so one tradition has it. Another version credits Confucius with advising against the use of knives at the table, for they would remind the diners of the kitchen and the slaughterhouse, places the “honorable and upright man keeps well away from.” Thus Chinese food has traditionally been prepared in bite-sized pieces or cooked to sufficient tenderness so that pieces could be torn apart with the chopsticks alone.
Just as Western eating utensils evolved in response to real and perceived shortcomings, so a characteristic form of modern chopsticks, rounded at the food end and squarish at the end that fits in the hand, no doubt evolved over the course of time because rounded sticks taken from nature left something to be desired. Whereas any available twigs may have served well the function of grasping food from a common pot, they would not have seemed so appropriate for dining in more formal settings. The obvious way to imitate twigs to make better chopsticks would be to form wood into straight, round rods of the desired size. But such an apparent improvement might also have highlighted shortcomings overlooked in the cruder implements. Finely shaped chopsticks that were of the same diameter at both the food and the finger ends might prove to be too thick to tear apart certain foods easily, or too thin to be comfortable during a longish meal. Thus, it would have
been an obvious further improvement to make the sticks tapered, with the different ends becoming fixed at compromise sizes that made them function better for both food and hand. Whether uniform or tapered, however, round chopsticks would tend to twist in the fingers and roll off the table, and so squaring one end eliminated two annoyances in what is certainly a brilliant design.
Putting implements as common as knife and fork and chopsticks into an evolutionary perspective, tentative as it necessarily must be, gives a new slant to the concept of their design, for they do not spring fully formed from the mind of some maker but, rather, become shaped and reshaped through the (principally negative) experiences of their users within the social, cultural, and technological contexts in which they are embedded. The formal evolution of artifacts in turn has profound influences on how we use them.
Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a “form follows function” argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating.
What form does follow is the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do. Clever people in the past, whom we today might call inventors, designers, or engineers, observed the failure of existing things to function as well as might be imagined. By focusing on the shortcomings of things, innovators altered those items to remove the imperfections, thus producing new, improved objects. Different innovators in different places, starting with rudimentary solutions to the same basic problem, focused on different faults at different times, and so we have inherited culture-specific artifacts that are daily reminders that even so primitive a function as eating imposes no single form on the implements used to effect it.
The evolution of eating utensils provides a strong paradigm for the evolution of artifacts generally. There are clearly technical components to the story, for even the kind of wood in chopsticks or the kind of metal in knives and forks will have a serious impact on the way the utensils can be formed and can carry out their functions. Technological advances can have far-reaching implications for the manner of manufacture and use of utensils, as the introduction of stainless steel did for tableware, which in turn can affect their price and availability across broad economic classes of people. But the stories associated with knives, forks, and spoons also illustrate well how interrelated are technology and culture generally. The form, nature, and use of all artifacts are as influenced by politics, manners, and personal preferences as by that nebulous entity, technology. And the evolution of the artifacts in turn has profound influences on manners and social intercourse.
But how do technology and culture interact to shape the world beyond the dinner table? Are there general principles whereby all sorts of things, familiar and unfamiliar, evolve into their shapes and sizes and systems? If not in tableware, does form follow function in the genesis and development of our more high-tech designs, or is the alliterative phrase just an alluring consonance that lulls the mind to sleep? Is the proliferation of made things, such as the seemingly endless line of serving pieces that complement a table service, merely a capitalist trick to sell consumers what they do not need? Or do artifacts multiply and diversify in an evolutionary way as naturally as do living organisms, each having its purpose in some wider scheme of things? Is it true that necessity is the mother of invention, or is that just an old wives’ tale? These are among the questions that have prompted this book. In order to begin to answer them, it will be helpful first to look beyond a place setting of examples to rules, and then to illustrate them by an omnivorous selection of further examples. Thus is the design problem of this literary artifact.
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Form Follows Failure
The evolution of the modern knife and fork from flint and stick, and the evolution of the spoon from the cupped hands and shells of eons ago, seem thoroughly reasonable stories. But they are more than stories, constructed after the fact by imaginative social scientists; the way our common tableware has developed to its present form is but a single example of a fundamental principle by which all made things come to look and function the way they do. That principle revolves about our perception of how existing things fail to do what we expect them to do as well and conveniently and economically as we think they should or wish they would. In short, they leave something to be desired.
But whereas the shortcomings of an existing thing may be expressed in terms of a need for improvement, it is really want rather than need that drives the process of technological evolution. Thus we may need air and water, but generally we do not require air conditioning or ice water in any fundamental way. We may find food indispensable, but it is not necessary to eat it with a fork. Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention. Every artifact is somewhat wanting in its function, and this is what drives its evolution.
Here, then, is the central idea: the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation, and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators, and engineers. And there follows a corollary: Since nothing is perfect, and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything is subject to change over time. There can be no such thing as a “perfected” artifact; the future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing.
If this hypothesis is universally valid and can explain the evolution of all made things, it must apply to any artifact of which we can think. It must explain the evolution of the zipper no less than the pin; the aluminum can no less than the hamburger package; the suspension bridge no less than Scotch tape. The hypothesis fleshed out must also have the potential for explaining why some of our most everyday things continue to look the way they do in spite of all their obvious shortcomings. It must explain why some things change for the worse, and why those things aren’t made in the good old way. Some background from the writings of inventors and designers and those who think about invention and design can set the stage for the case studies that will test the hypothesis.
The large number of things that have been devised and made by humans throughout the ages has been estimated in some recently published books on the design and evolution of artifacts. Donald Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, describes sitting at his desk and seeing about him a host of specialized objects, including various writing devices (pencils, ballpoint pens, fountain pens, felt-tip markers, highlighters, etc.), desk accessories (paper clips, tape, scissors, pads of paper, books, bookmarks, etc.), fasteners (buttons, snaps, zippers, laces, etc.), etc. In fact, Norman counted over one hundred items before he tired of the task. He suggests that there are perhaps twenty thousand everyday things that we might encounter in our lives, and he quotes the psychologist Irving Biederman as estimating that there are probably “30,000 readily discriminable objects for the adult.” The number was arrived at by counting the concrete nouns in a dictionary.
George Basalla, in The Evolution of Technology, suggests the great “diversity of things made by human hands” over the past two hundred years by pointing out that five million patents have been issued in America alone. (Not every new thing is patented, of course, and we can get some idea of the enormity of our rearrangement and processing of things by noting that over ten million new chemical substances were registered in the American Chemical Society’s computer data base between 1957 and 1990.) Basalla also notes that, in support of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, biologists have identified and named over one and a half million species of flora and fauna, and thus he concludes that, if each American patent were “counted as the equivalent of an organic
species, then the technological can be said to have a diversity three times greater than the organic.” He then introduces the fundamental questions of his study:
The variety of made things is every bit as astonishing as that of living things. Consider the range that extends from stone tools to microchips, from waterwheels to spacecraft, from thumbtacks to skyscrapers. In 1867 Karl Marx was surprised to learn … that five hundred different kinds of hammers were produced in Birmingham, England, each one adapted to a specific function in industry or the crafts. What forces led to the proliferation of so many variations of this ancient and common tool? Or more generally, why are there so many different kinds of things?
Basalla dismisses the “traditional wisdom” that attributes technological diversity to necessity and utility, and looks for other explanations, “especially ones that can incorporate the most general assumptions about the meaning and goals of life.” He finds that his search “can be facilitated by applying the theory of organic evolution to the technological world,” but he acknowledges that the “evolutionary metaphor must be approached with caution,” because fundamental differences exist between the made world and the natural world. In particular, Basalla admits that, whereas natural things arise out of random natural processes, made things come out of purposeful human activity. Such activity, manifested in psychological, economic, and other social and cultural factors, is what creates the milieu in which novelty appears among continuously evolving artifacts.
Adrian Forty has also reflected on the multitude of made objects. In Objects of Desire, he notes that historians have generally accounted for the diversification of designs in one of two ways. The first explanation, albeit a rather circular one, is that there is an ongoing evolution of new needs created by the development of new designs, such as machinery and appliances that are increasingly complicated and compact. The new designs require new tools for assembly and disassembly, and these new tools in turn enable still further new designs to be realized. The second explanation for the diversity of artifacts is “the desire of designers to express their ingenuity and artistic talent.” Both theories were used by Siegfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command, but neither theory, convincing though it may be in explaining particular cases of diversity, covers all cases, as Forty admits.