The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are.

by Henry Petroski

  In order to give an elaborate dinner it is almost indispensable that one should have a large quantity of china and plate, otherwise the delay from washing the dishes will be endless.…

  When one plate is taken away at the end of a course another is at once substituted for it. If a knife and fork are laid on this, the guest should take them off promptly, otherwise he may delay the serving of the next course.

  Washing silver between courses would have been, as it still is, inconvenient at best, and so a great number of individual pieces of silver would naturally have had to be owned by anyone who wished to entertain in a grand way. Such a multiplicity of silverware could have been achieved by having a great many identical knives, forks, and spoons of standard design, of course, but this would not have obviated the failure of the common knife and fork to work as well with, say, fish and shellfish as they did with a piece of roast.

  The oyster fork, for example, appears to have evolved from the standard or even the small fork because the latter’s tines were so long and gently curved that they could not easily work oysters whole from their more deeply curved shell. The older fork could have been used like a lever to pry the oyster free, of course, but this might risk launching the morsel across the table. The oyster fork’s short tines allow the leftmost one to be used as a blade to sever the oyster from the shell, the fork’s small curved tines allow it to conform to the shape of the oyster shell, and the fork’s shorter handle allows the diner to exercise better control over this delicate action. The end tine of oyster forks also came to be used for scooping out from the shell the meat of lobsters and the like. This kind of action, along with that of severing stubborn oysters, might have caused the cutting tine to bend over time, and so it came to be widened while at the same time retaining its thinness through the depth of the bowl (so that it possessed a cutting ability) and a pointedness (so that it had some efficacy as a lobster pick). Regardless of their thickness or pointedness, closely spaced tines could get in the way when one was attempting to reach into a lobster claw to extract meat, and so many a seafood (née oyster) fork came to have its tines more widely spaced, or even splayed out, to facilitate the action. As fashion and tastes changed, designers groped for the optimal form, not only for aesthetic reasons but also to eliminate functional failures.

  Amid the proliferation of specialized tableware in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the general form of forks was still more or less set. Yet arbiters of taste were very sensitive to the use of even the standard fork, apparently because, having only relatively recently evolved its fourth tine, it was still among the newest table tools of an increasing segment of the population. A book on social customs published in 1887, for example, followed a brief history of the fork’s emergence with a caveat:

  All English-speaking nations, however, as well as the French, now absolutely forbid the use of the knife except to cut with. On the Continent, society is not so strictly divided by the “knife line;” and it would not be safe in Germany, for instance, to judge of a man’s social position by his method of using his knife.…

  The fork has now become the favorite and fashionable utensil for conveying food to the mouth. First it crowded out the knife, and now in its pride it has invaded the domain of the once powerful spoon. The spoon is now pretty well subdued also, and the fork, insolent and triumphant, has become a sumptuary tyrant. The true devotee of fashion does not dare to use a spoon except to stir his tea or to eat his soup with, and meekly eats his ice-cream with a fork and pretends to like it.

  A contemporaneous writer on “modern manners” thought some of her readers might be interested in knowing that “the aversion to the use of the knife is of comparatively recent origin,” and was not universal among civilized people:

  In England and her colonies, and in France, Austria and America the “knife line” is strictly drawn; but the Russians (except those who adopt the French manners), the Poles, Danes, Swedes, Italians and Germans, often thrust their knives into their mouths and do not consider it inelegant.

  Another writer cautioned that all “made dishes, such as quenelles, rissoles, patties, &c., should be eaten with a fork only, and the knife should not be used in eating them, as a knife would be unnecessary and out of place; it would therefore be a vulgarism to use one.”

  But, with so much favoring of the fork, it had a lot of tasks to do at the table, and even a few specialized forks could not accomplish all things equally well. And, to make matters worse, it was freely admitted that the fork was “much more difficult to handle than the knife.” Given a social climate that encouraged the introduction of new gadgets, many specialized forks came to be developed as the shortcomings of existing ones multiplied with the expansion of menus and the concurrent diminished use of the knife and spoon. The pastry fork, for example, came into existence in the wake of a new fashion, described in 1864 by the etiquette writer Eliza Leslie as “foolish” but “fashionable”:

  It is an affectation of ultra-fashion to eat pie with a fork, and has a very awkward and inconvenient look. Cut it up first with your knife and fork both; then proceed to eat it with care, the fork in your right hand.

  What Emily Post termed “zigzagging” thus appears to have been practiced in the mid-nineteenth century, but in time the knife dropped completely out of the act of eating pie. Hence the fork alone had to serve a cutting as well as a spearing function, and forks with cutting tines were introduced. A “cutting fork” was patented in 1869 by Reed & Barton. First offered in dinner- and dessert-fork sizes, the design soon extended to pie forks and pastry forks and to the larger cold-meat fork.

  In the 1882 novel A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells, an innkeeper in rural Maine observed a gentleman guest eat mince pie “with a fork as easily as another would with a knife” and admired his “skill in getting the last flakes of the crust on his fork.” Such dexterity was no doubt aided by the widespread introduction in the 1880s of pie and pastry forks with special (for right-handers, at least) cutting tines, not only widened to resist being easily bent but also pointed and flattened to pick and scoop morsels like knives of old.

  There also appeared the likes of salad forks, lemon forks, pickle forks, asparagus forks, sardine forks, and more, each with its tines widened, thickened, sharpened, splayed, barbed, spread, joined, or somehow modified to reduce the faults that other forks exhibited in handling some very specific food. But not all forms of forks evolved so directly, and though the knife may have been endangered in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it was no extinct species. Special dishes would continue to frustrate the diner using existing, albeit multiplying, utensils.

  The vast differences in texture between fish and roast make them respond quite differently to the knife and fork. Properly cooked fish flakes readily, of course, whereas meat need not. But many foods have divergent responses to the knife and fork, and so this alone seems not to have been a sufficient reason for the standard dinner knife and fork to fall out of use for fish, and so for specialized implements to evolve. Yet it became common in the late nineteenth century for etiquette books to assert that fish especially was never to be eaten with a knife, although, in the style of the genre, the books generally offered no explanation for the prohibition. By the early twentieth century, the specialized fish knife and fork had come to be standard tableware, but still few explanations were offered as to why the table knife of the day could not be used.

  To this day, writers on etiquette seem at a loss to explain exactly how the oddly shaped fish knife is to be used, and Emily Post considered it “wasteful, since it must be bought and kept polished for no other purpose than for eating fish.” Even if this had become true in the 1920s, there must have been perceived shortcomings of the standard knife and fork for eating fish that caused the fish knife and fork to evolve as they did. Understanding the technological context in which this occurred enables us to understand better why the “wasteful” utensils have the form and use they do.

  It was the a
cidic nature of fish, often aggravated by the addition of lemon juice, that prompted a change in table manners and that ultimately led to a new form of tableware. Acidic fish juices corroded the steel from which knife blades were generally still made in the late nineteenth century, silver being too soft to take and hold a keen cutting edge. The book Manners and Rules of Good Society, which was written by an anonymous “Member of the Aristocracy” and which was in its thirty-third edition in 1911, indicated that a table knife and fork had indeed long been used to eat fish, but that it was the failure of the steel-bladed knife to work satisfactorily in the aggressively acidic environment that prompted change:

  It was then discovered that a steel knife gave an unpalatable flavour to the fish, and a crust of bread was substituted for the knife. This fashion lasted a considerable time, in spite of the fingers being thus brought unpleasantly near to the plate, and to this day old-fashioned people have a predilection for that crust of bread. One evening a well-known diner-out discarded his crust of bread, and ate his fish with two silver forks; this notion found such general favour that society dropped the humble crust and took up a second fork. This fashion had its little day, but at length the two forks were found heavy for the purpose and not altogether satisfactory, and were superseded by the dainty and convenient little silver fish-knife and fork which are now in general use.

  The fish knife and fork were being provided “at all formal dinners” by the late 1880s, according to another writer, who also noted that the old rule against using a knife with fish “was so very inconvenient, especially in eating shad.” The new knives were of silver, of course, because that did not corrode in the fish’s acid, and they were most notably “of a peculiar shape and of small size, as also are the forks that accompany them.” The peculiar shape of the fish knife, which might be described as notched-back scimitar, appears to have evolved in part out of the failure of the dinner fork to deal effectively with a whole fish on the plate. The head and tail would have had to be ripped rather than cut away, and a general ripping of the skin would have had to be performed to get the flesh off the backbone. All the ripping would have naturally left a lot of loose bones to be dealt with in the fish and thus in the mouth. Even though a knife of silver would not be so sharp as a steel knife, its blade would certainly be keen enough to sever the head and tail and slice a properly cooked fish along its backbone. The blade did not have to be long to reach into the fish and separate the meat from the backbone, but a wider-than-normal blade was very effective in keeping the fish from flaking apart and sticking to the bones. The odd notch near the knife tip was evidently a vestige of the fork tines that had necessarily performed these operations before, and might also serve to catch the backbone, once this was loosened from the fish, and keep it from slipping off the knife while being swung to a place on the plate away from the fish meat. To distinguish the silver fish knife from the more common steel-bladed ones, the more ornamental blade also evolved. The fish fork, which worked in concert with the knife in performing these operations, also functioned better for having proportions wider than those of a normal fork, since this made it less likely to fragment the fish in the deboning operation.

  Emily Post may have considered the “special fish-fork wasteful” and declared that “fretwork trimmings across the prongs are absolutely taboo”; still, she did admit that “the plain [fish] fork with a flattened first tine, and the silver knife with the pointed end and saw-tooth edge, are not taboo, because their designs have tradition.” But these rather recently specialized utensils really owed their form and existence more to technological adaptation than to a tradition spanning mere decades. And though the introduction of stainless-steel knife blades in 1914 may have made even the silver fish knife itself a bit “wasteful,” by then its highly specialized if mysterious form had firmly displaced the ordinary knife for fish; silver had become the “traditional” material for the fish knife. As much as she may have eschewed functional explanations for including one piece of silver and excluding another in her chest of necessities, in her own dining Emily Post may herself have recognized the downright aptness of the fish knife and fork, even if she could not bring herself to articulate it except in terms of “tradition.”

  Other specialized pieces of tableware, whether considered traditional or not, have also evolved because they removed the inconveniences and worse that arose in employing the usual pieces in unusual situations. Thus, the fruit knife and fork, the former with a pointed tip and sharp edge, and the latter often with three very sharp tines, reduce the spray of fruit juices at the table and make piercing and slicing fruit much more convenient. The grapefruit spoon, pointed to match the shape of a fruit segment and serrated at the tip or along one edge to assist cutting out the pulp, has a great advantage over the teaspoon that is immediately evident to anyone who has squirted or been squirted by someone across the breakfast table. The iced-tea spoon, also variously called a lemonade or ice-cream soda spoon, has obvious advantages over the teaspoon in the tall glasses in which the cool drinks are served. In the early part of this century, these spoons were made with hollow handles that doubled as straws. Whether or not spoon and straw should be in the glass simultaneously, they often were, and anyone who has tried to avoid being poked in the eye by the spoon, or to keep the wet straw away from the spoon end, will immediately recognize the convenience of the invention.

  Emily Post may have had the innate wisdom to eschew the folly of the Victorians when she declared unnecessary the large number of specialized pieces of silver that had evolved from the classic place setting, but her reasoning was a bit askew. The newer pieces themselves were not without function; indeed, they enabled the fin-de-siècle diner to eat an elaborate meal with a style and good form that some late-twentieth-century observers of society and culture would love to regain.

  The multiplicity of pieces of tableware exhibited in such early-twentieth-century patterns as those collected by Grape Nuts fell out of fashion with faster times, harder times, and smaller homes. In 1965, for example, Reed & Barton’s “Francis I” pattern was advertised with only “the ten most essential serving pieces” out of the original seventy-seven pieces it had contained in 1907. Silverware patterns now typically contain a fraction of the special pieces of a century ago, with many pieces doing multiple duty, and there still appears to be little standardization in the forms or names of the utensils. What looks like a fish fork in one pattern may be called a salad fork in another, and vice versa. What is offered as one pattern’s butter knife looks curiously like another’s fish knife, though it is perhaps a bit smaller. Confusion appears to abound, and in some of the more modern patterns especially the pieces can’t be identified without a catalogue—if then.

  Many specialized pieces of silver were developed in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, including this design-patented medicine spoon that answered to many of the real or imagined objections parents had to using a good teaspoon for a sick child. Patents also protected processes for reinforcing silverplate at points of heavy wear on forks and spoons. (photo credit 8.7)

  Many of the most contemporary silverware patterns appear to be designed more for how the pieces look than for how they work, and this would appear to contradict every rational expectation of technological evolution. But the paradox is resolved if we understand that there is a kind of design that can ignore function entirely. We might say that this is a “form eschews function” school of design, and one that places considerations of aesthetics, novelty, and style above everything else. Whatever existing silverware there might be, it can always be argued by purveyors of the new to be less balanced, less new, and less stylish than the latest offering. The knives and forks that come out of such design considerations can often appear to have their blades and tines growing organically out of the handles, where the unity of the pieces originates, and from which inspiration seems to spring. But to design from the handle is to shoot from the hip when it comes to silverware, for the business end of the individual pieces is w
here the action is going to be. Though Emily Post may not have perceived that tradition emerges out of the minimization of failure, there is no excuse for a designer to overlook the fact. Yet this is exactly what modern product designers seem to do when they strive so hard for a striking new look that they throw out function with tradition.

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  Domestic Fashion and Industrial Design

  A chef’s knife and a joiner’s saw perform similar functions in analogous contexts. Each is used by a frequently sullen artisan to prepare the parts of some grand design, whether it be an elegant dish for the table or a fine sideboard for the dining room. Since cooking and joinery are ancient arts, the business ends of cutting tools have evolved to a highly specialized state, and different knives and saws are used according to the task at hand. But whether the handles on a chef’s set of knives or a joiner’s collection of saws match or are attractive is seldom the overriding feature by which they are chosen or upon which the artisan’s talents or work is judged. Rather, a master’s favorite old knife or saw may have so chipped and splintered a handle that no apprentice would likely ever choose it over a newer model. The visibly misshapen handles of many long-used tools neither recommend nor fit them to any but the craftsman whose hand has eroded them over a lifetime as imperceptibly as a river does its canyon’s walls.