THE ORIGIN OF EVERYDAY THINGS

by Pam North

What do a safety pin and a can opener have in common?  They are both
everyday objects so commonplace that we pay them scant attention, yet
they make life a bit easier and they have interesting stories as to
how they came to be.

The safety pin was fashioned in 1849 with the goal of resolving a
debt.  A New York inventor named Walter Hunt owed an employee $15, and
he was too broke to pay him.  When the employee offered to settle for
the rights to whatever Hunt could improvise from a single piece of
wire, Hunt agreed.  Hunt was a proven inventor, having designed a
stove that burned hard coal, a fire engine warning gong and an early
sewing machine (which he had decided against marketing because it
would threaten the livelihood of seamstresses).  Despite his talent
and ingenuity, however, he had never profited from any of his
inventions.  Hunt spent three hours twisting an eight-inch piece of
brass wire in an effort to satisfy his obligation to his draftsman,
and the result was a wire creation with a clasp at one end, a point at
the other, and a coil in the center that acted as a spring to keep the
point lodged safely in the clasp.  Hunt called it his "dress pin," and
he decided to patent the idea himself.  He then sold the rights to it
for $400 (the equivalent of a few thousand dollars in today's money).
His employee was reimbursed the $15 from the sale, leaving the
remainder for Hunt. Over the years millions of safety pins have been
manufactured and sold, but Hunt made nothing on them after his sale of
the rights to his invention.

"Tin canisters" had been in existence for a half-century before the
invention of the can opener.  An English merchant, Peter Durand, had
developed a way to preserve food in cans, but had never come up with a
way to get it back out.  The generally accepted method was to use a
hammer and chisel.  British soldiers used pocket knives, bayonets
and sometimes resorted to shooting cans open with their rifles.  It
wasn't until 1858 that Ezra Werner devised a can opener, an awkward
instrument with a large, curved blade that was driven into the rim of
the can and forced around its perimeter to cut off the top.  The blade
and the method were so dangerous that they were used primarily by
grocers to open cans as a service for their customers, who would
take their cans home already opened.  When the Civil War broke out in
1861, a need arose for canned rations that could accompany military
troops to the battlefield.  Warner's bent-bayonet-style can openers,
still the unwieldy and perilous method of the time, were issued to all
soldiers in the field.  After the war, canned goods became even more
numerous and popular, and the invention of a better opener became a
necessity.  In 1870, a Connecticut inventor, William Lyman, devised a
crank-operated version that held a cutting wheel to slice through the
metal can top.  San Francisco's Star Can Company added the improvement
of a serrated wheel to grip the can and rotate it against the cutting
wheel.  The electric can opener was introduced in 1931, but even the
modern, improved adaptations are basically still the reflection of
Lyman's invention.  Safety pins also have remained basically true to
their original design conception, which tends to reinforce the old
adage, "Don't mess with a good thing."