The needle is among the oldest of artifacts, and its usefulness is without question. Yet in certain applications it has severe shortcomings. The infrastructural thimble answers to the problem of pushing a needle through a tough piece of material before the needle itself pierces the finger. And the clever diamond-shaped loop of fine spring wire is a godsend to those of us whose squinting eye can never seem to focus on the more squinting one we are trying to thread. But the needle has also led to the development of many other twentieth-century artifacts that we may hardly recognize as related.
Needles can be thought of as headless pins with a single eye meant to pass readily through anything from the hem of a veil to the hide of a camel, leaving behind only a thread of a clue to their presence. When fully sewn into a garment, a piece of thread can be thought of as a continuous and flexible ghost of a needle, but with no bulging eye to find our most sensitive spot and no point to pierce our skin. Needle and thread not only fashioned the clothes of our ancestors but also gathered printed leaves of paper into signatures and these into volumes; though in this latter application the thread may have been invisible to the reader, it certainly left its mark on the book.
The classic shape of a book’s spine derived from the fact that the folds of paper that formed it were thickened by the passes of thread that they contained. To keep a bound book from having a spine much thicker than its other edges, and thus from having the undesirable shape of a wedge that would make stacking and shelving books much less convenient than it is, the sewn spine was rounded and fanned out before binding, so that the threads did not sit directly on top of one another. The boards that formed the hard front and back of the book added enough thickness to rise above the thickest part of the spine, and the hinge of cloth that connected them followed the rounded shape of its contents. The characteristic shapes of books were clearly captured by Dürer in his Portrait of Erasmus, with the front edge of their pages fitting the curve of their spines because the paper was trimmed before the spine was formed.
Though today’s books may appear to retain the curved look in their spines, it is really just a rounding of the stiffened binding cloth. The book proper has a squarish shape, with a flat front edge as well as a flat spine. This change in form came about because the traditional procedure of sewing books in signatures was time-consuming and costly, and thus failed to be as economical as alternative procedures. The typical book is now “perfect-bound,” which means that its sheets are folded in signatures as before but not sewn. Rather, the signatures are gathered and stacked, and trimmed all around to a boxlike shape. Containing no thread in its folds, the stack of paper does not bulge at the spine, and so does not have to be rounded. Instead, it is ground to a rough finish, the better to receive an adhesive similar to the stuff that holds pads of paper together. This procedure was first used in binding cheap paperbacks and has now been almost universally adapted to even the most expensive hard-covers, to the dismay of many an author, reader, and bibliophile. In spite of its name, perfect binding has great failings, not the least of which is that a book so bound is often badly misshapen after a single reading. The modern bookshelf is thus characterized not by a neat ripple of round-ended volumes but by a jagged surface of creased spines. When seen on end, once-read perfect-bound books are sadly skewed reminders of how form follows fortune. Even if this may be to the myopic delight of manufacturers, it can certainly be to the dismay of those who have a sense of form.
In the late nineteenth century, magazines came to be bound by what amounted to sewing with a piece of wire, which could serve as both needle and thread, and a single-wire stitch was certainly much stronger and self-contained than one of cotton. Furthermore, a short piece of bent wire could pierce and hold together more separate sheets of paper, and eventually small booklets and magazines could be made in a single signature with a single stitching operation, known as “saddle stitching.” Toward the end of the century, wire stitchers were common in the printing-and-bookbinding industry. Although they were cumbersome machines and took some time to adjust for different thicknesses of work, this was not an unacceptable disadvantage in producing large printings. But for smaller jobs the setup time could be prohibitive, and so a stitching machine that could be adjusted with a slight turn of a screw would lower considerably the cost of printing small runs of small booklets.
Such a machine was built in 1896 by Thomas Briggs, an inventor who lived in the Boston suburb of Arlington. He called his company the Boston Wire Stitcher Company, after the machine it manufactured, and the firm rapidly outgrew its two early homes. In 1904 it settled in a large new factory in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, where the company’s descendant flourishes today. Briggs’s original machine worked on a conventional principle, which was to feed wire from a head parallel to the seam being stitched, cut off the proper length, bend it into a U-shape, and then drive it into the work and clasp it into what was called a stitch. Because of the size of the feeding head, stitches could not be made closer than twelve inches apart in a single operation. This meant that to bind a small pamphlet took at least two separate stitching operations. In East Greenwich, Briggs developed a machine that fed the wire perpendicular to the seam, cut off a piece, and then turned it before bending it and stitching it into the work. This meant that stitches could be made as close as two inches apart in a single operation, and so binding could proceed at least twice as fast as before.
What made wire-stitching machines so complicated and hence expensive was the mechanism to cut off, turn, and bend the short pieces of wire. To overcome this disadvantage, machines were developed that used individual pieces of wire preformed into a shape that could be driven directly into material being stitched together. The individual pieces were called staples, after the U-shaped pieces of wire with sharp ends that were driven into wooden doors, walls, and posts to secure hooks, hasps, wire, and the like. Although rudimentary stapling machines date from as early as 1877, the first ones had to be fed by hand a staple at a time, and thus were very slow-operating indeed. In 1894 a stapler was introduced that employed a supply chamber into which a line of loose staples could be loaded, but it was a very delicate procedure, for the loose staples had to be pushed off a wooden core onto which they were packed, an operation that had to be done slowly and carefully lest jamming occur. These shortcomings were removed by wrapping a supply of staples in paper around a tin core, thus holding them in place until used; the stapling machine could cut a fresh staple out each time the line was advanced. The driving-and-clinching operation itself was relatively simple and straightforward, principally requiring brute force to push staples through the work and turn them on a sturdy anvil on the back side. Thus, stapling machines could be made inexpensive enough for the smallest printshops and binderies to buy and use, and these were indeed the earliest markets for the new devices.
The first of Briggs’s pamphlet-and-magazine staplers were large, freestanding, and foot-operated. They certainly would have been overkill for fastening just a few papers together in an office, and so simple straight pins or the newer wire paper clips continued to be used for that. Hence the Boston Wire Stitcher Company saw business offices as a ready market for a light-duty stapler, and in 1914 offered a desk model priced accordingly. However, the first desk staplers employed loose or paper-wrapped staples, were relatively complicated in their construction, and were prone to jamming. It was not until 1923, at the height of office-efficiency movements, that a simplified desk stapler was introduced and “the use of staples for attaching related papers received its first big push.” Soon the company introduced staples glued together in a strip, “which eliminated the disadvantages of handling, loading and feeding which had plagued users of loose staples,” and this unpatented idea spread quickly among the growing competition. As stapling machines grew in importance for the Boston Wire Stitcher Company, which had long since moved out of Boston, a distinctive trade name was sought. From the already shorthand name of Boston Stitcher came the contraction Bostitch (pronoun
ced “Boss-titch”), which was registered as a trademark for the stapler line. This name became so prominent that in 1948 the company’s name was changed to Bostitch, Inc.
By the early 1930s, desk staplers were smooth-operating little machines indeed, and changes were generally restricted to cosmetic streamlining in keeping with the times. But the new models also incorporated an easier method of loading and could be used as a tacker as well. Thus, the light desk staple, which had the origins of its name, at least, in the U-shaped, double-pointed tacks that for so long had attached hooks to doors and barbed wire to fence posts, was being employed (not always to the benefit of the surfaces so attacked) to fasten signs and notices to bulletin boards, telephone poles, and school walls and doors. This was but one of the hundreds of variations of fasteners made by just one company, whose house history confirms that “new models are always under development, sometimes to do a job that has not been done before, sometimes to do better or faster a job that is already being done.” It is especially out of such comparatives that variations in the form of staplers and all technological artifacts evolve.
6
Stick Before Zip
On many a cold winter day I have been frustrated in trying to keep my long woolen scarf wrapped securely around my neck. It seems that the scarf somehow works its way loose over my shoulder with the rhythm of my step, made all the more rapid in the biting wind, and I find myself constantly having to throw the free end back around my shoulder. I have experimented with letting different lengths of scarf hang in front of and behind my body, but I have yet to come upon a foolproof combination of number of wraps around my neck and arrangement of hanging ends that works under all conditions. On the worst of days, I have securely knotted the scarf so that I might avoid the frustration of having constantly to readjust it in the extreme cold. The failure of the scarf to stay in place has driven all my experimentation.
During my winter walks, it is not hard for me to imagine our earliest ancestors experiencing similar frustrations with the animal skins they used to protect themselves against the elements. The skins could be held closed with the hands and arms, of course, but that would have been as inconvenient as my having to hold my scarf in place by keeping a hand on my shoulder. Though this would still allow me to carry a bookbag with my free hand, our earliest ancestors might have preferred to have both hands unencumbered, in order to be ready hunters or to be able to flee more effectively from angered huntees. Since the bulkiness of animal skins would not allow them to be easily tied around the body, alternative means of closure were developed.
Fish bones, pointed fragments of wood, animal bone, or horn would have been found naturally wherever ancient peoples were. But the first threading of a sharp object through two overlapping pieces of skin or fur was an act of invention. The identity of that ancient genius who was so inspired is lost to history, but, somehow, somewhere, garments came to be fastened with pointed pins of bone and horn, which naturally evolved into metal devices.
One great disadvantage of closing garments with straight pins, whatever the material, was that they might be dropped and lost in the course of dressing and undressing or they might work loose during the act of walking or running. Furthermore, the constant insertion and removal of pins would have steadily enlarged holes in garments and hastened their disintegration. This undesirable feature of pins would not have been ameliorated when they came to be used with the woven fabrics that replaced animal skins. Thus, fasteners that were not only less easily dropped and lost but also less likely to wear holes in clothing would have been welcome innovations. Pins might have been tied to garments so the pins were not lost so easily, but this would not have solved the problem that a pin repeatedly stuck into the same place soon wears out its welcome. Such alternatives as the frog-and-loop fastener, whose form might be imagined to have evolved from the pin in as mysterious a way as the form of a natural frog evolves from a tadpole, provided both the advantages of an attached pin and a fixed site of tougher material through which the pin could be repeatedly inserted and removed to close and open the garment.
In ancient times, metal brooches and buckles also came to be used for fastening clothing. While these were fully separable from the garment, they were larger than straight pins and so less likely to be lost, and brooches and buckles held firmly enough not to come loose easily in the course of a day of movement. As long as twenty-five hundred years ago, the Romans developed safety pins, but they seem to have been rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1842 Thomas Woodward, of Brooklyn, New York, patented a “manner of constructing shielded pins for securing shawls, diapers, &c.,” which he called “the Victorian shielded shawl and diaper pin.” His device consisted of a pin hinged to a cupped piece of metal that covers the point, and it is highly suggestive of a modern safety pin. According to Woodward’s patent, his shielded pin had distinct advantages over unshielded pins: “It will not become loosened by the motion of the wearer and … the point of the pin cannot, by any accident, be caused to puncture, or scratch, the person.” However, this pin had no integral spring, and so it had to rely upon the bulk of material compressed within it to hold the point in the shield.
Straight pins of one kind or another were used to fasten garments at least as early as the Bronze Age, and among the age-old problems with the use of such pins was their tendency to work loose and prick the wearer. In 1842 Thomas Woodward patented this “shawl pin,” which could be kept in place by having its point pressed against a guard by the bulk of the material; the guard also served to keep the point from sticking the user. (photo credit 6.1)
That shortcoming was removed by the “dress-pin” invented by Walter Hunt of New York City and patented in 1849. His pin had “the distinguishing features of … one piece of wire or metal combining a spring, and clasp or catch, in which catch, the point of said pin is forced and by its own spring securely retained.” Of all the microfilmed patents I have looked at, Hunt’s for the safety pin is the only one whose page of illustrations looks like the fragment of a long-lost manuscript. The chipped and broken brittle edges of the original paper document from which the copy was made suggest the curiosity of countless patent examiners, searchers, and inventors to understand the secret of a million-dollar idea. The illustration is famous in part because of the story behind the invention of the new safety pin.
Hunt was a prolific inventor, who was responsible for creating a forerunner of the repeating rifle and the sewing machine. In fact, he actually built the first sewing machine in America, but never patented it because he thought it would destroy jobs. However, Hunt did patent many other items, and for his applications he would naturally have needed to have drawings made. Evidently Hunt was in debt to his draftsman when he proposed that the debt would be forgiven and Hunt would be paid $400 if he assigned to the draftsman the rights to whatever devices Hunt could invent out of an old piece of wire. The safety pin was the product of three hours of twisting.
Among the shortcomings of “shawl pins” with no spring of their own was the need to gather just the right bulk of material so that the pin would be kept firmly latched and yet not be bent out of shape. Although self-springing safety pins appear to have existed in Roman times, in 1849 Walter Hunt received a patent for a modern version. His patent, which illustrates various decorative embodiments of the basic idea, is considered a well-thumbed classic among inventors, as attested to by the condition of the copy from which this microfilmed image was made. (photo credit 6.2)
Although the drawings of Hunt’s patent are not signed, we can assume that the illustrator was one of the assignees, “Wm. Richardson” or “Jno. Richardson.” But, whoever profited from the patent, the inventor clearly believed he had overcome the failings of pre-existing fasteners, for he declared the safety pin to be “more secure and durable than any other plan of a clasp pin, heretofore in use, there being no joint to break or pivot to wear or get loose as in other plans.” Furthermore, the self-sprung pin could be used “without danger of bend
ing … or wounding the fingers.” It clearly eliminated a lot of the failings of earlier devices.
Whether Sumerian or of later design, the safety pin and other loose and separate fasteners were not practical for closing very tight-fitting garments such as came to be fashionable in the Middle Ages. Body-hugging garments were made possible by the development of fasteners like hooks and eyes and laces. Hooks and eyes had the advantage that they could be fastened quickly, but they were relatively bulky and liable to snag things on the hook. Lacings, on the other hand, while not as bulky and not subject to snagging, took a relatively long time to close up tight.
Buttons and buttonholes were one kind of compromise that removed many of the objections to earlier fasteners. Although the button had been known since Roman times, being inserted into a loop sewn onto the edge of a mating piece of garment, the buttonhole as we know it did not evolve until the thirteenth century, perhaps in response to the failure of a button and loop to make as tight a closure as one might like on a cold windy day, or in response to the fragility of loops and their propensity to break when one was getting dressed for some big event. Perhaps the first buttonhole was actually hastily improvised with a knife or scissors in response to a loop’s breaking at the wrong time. But the unreinforced buttonhole would have torn open wider and wider with use, and thus would eventually have failed to hold its button very securely. This shortcoming might easily have led to the reinforcing provided by the now familiar specialized buttonhole stitching.
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are. Page 11
