Today, a reflection on moustraps and paperclips.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Two devices were patented in
1899. One was the familiar snap trap for catching mice. The
other was a machine for making the ubiquitous
Gem paper clip --
the kind you and I use every day.
The odd thing about both patents is that they were
among the very first for both devices. Yet each has
since been followed by thousands of patents that
claim to improve upon it.
Both are compromise solutions to difficult
problems. Both are simple, cheap, and easy to use.
The other designs go wrong in many ways. An
ill-conceived paperclip tears paper, or it fails to
keep its grip. Mousetraps have to be at least
somewhat clean and merciful in dispatching the
mouse -- and few designs are.
All those subsequent patents! Yet, no better
all-around exemplar of either invention has been
created. There has to be something subtle at play
We catch a clue when we look at the Arts and Crafts
Movement, which began in England in the
latter nineteenth century and soon swept America.
The movement had begun as resistance to big
industry and the sudden explosion of cheap,
The arts and crafts people soon spawned the art
nouveau school of design, with its leaves and
vine-like tendrils. Art nouveau was marked by
supple lines -- both graceful and ornate. By 1900,
art nouveau had become pretty routine, and the arts
and crafts movement had found a place right
alongside twentieth-century production.
Countless books-for-boys elaborated the theme. They
showed how to build our own radio, our own sled,
even our own airplane. These books presumed that we
would not only build, but that we'd also elaborate.
We were expected to invent as we went
Meanwhile, all this creative craftsmanship had
picked up a catchphrase. Emerson was widely
misquoted as having said, "Build a better mousetrap
and the world will beat a path to your door," and
the phrase caught our imaginations. The better
mousetrap became an idea around which we
molded our expectations -- a metaphor for the new
fusion of invention with arts and crafts.
Now we would all be inventors in our basement
shops. And, basement inventors really did create
all sorts of things. The number of patents per year
began rocketing upward. Roughly ninety percent of
all patents have been issued since 1900.
And building a better mousetrap somehow lies at the
root of it. The better mousetrap sounds like
doggerel, yet five thousand mousetrap patents have
been issued after the definitive one. It's
a metaphor of great power, a kind of holy icon of
invention. You may take this as far-fetched, but
all those after-the-fact mouse-trap patents seem to
play the role of a tithe that we pay to the icon.
Something happened at the turn of this century. We
all became inventors. And every time I look for
cause and effect, I run into the arts and crafts
movement -- and I run into mousetraps.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
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