The evolution of useful things : how everyday artifacts - from forks and pins to paper clips and zippers - came to be as they are

286 Pages·2010·3.2 MB·English

by  Petroski

Acclaim for Henry Petroski’s
THE EVOLUTION OF USEFUL THINGS
“[It] offers the reader many fascinating data about human artifacts.… Petroski is an amiable
and lucid writer.… He belong[s] with the poets, extending the Romantic embrace of nature to
the invented, manufactured world that has become man’s second nature.” —John Updike, The
New Yorker
“Petroski weaves wonderfully odd facts into this book.… [He] makes us pay attention to
ordinary objects … just the ticket for the technophile.” —Los Angeles Times
“A constellation of little marvels [that] all make good stories.… [A] paean to Yankee
ingenuity … an informative, entertaining book.” —Boston Globe
“One has to admire a man who delivers an intelligent tirade on a garbage bag.… Readable
and entertaining … Petroski liberally mixes biography, social history, design theory and even
word derivations into these affectionately told tales.” —Chicago Tribune
“This book is a monument to the historian’s curiosity and the engineer’s tenacity. It is a
treasure trove of fascinating facts and amusing anecdotes.” —New Criterion

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1994
Copyright © 1992 by Henry Petroski
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in
hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, in 1992.
Some of this material first appeared, in different form, in
American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Technology Review,
Wigwag, and Wilson Quarterly.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published
material:

Barrie & Jenkins: Excerpts from The Nature and Aesthetics of Design by David Pye (Barrie &
Jenkins, London, 1978). Reprinted by permission of Barrie & Jenkins, a division of The Random
Century Group Limited.
Caliban Books: Excerpt from William Smith, Potter and Farmer, 1790–1858 by George Sturt
(Caliban Books, London, 1978). Reprinted by permission.
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.: Excerpts from Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage by Emily Post.
Copyright © 1965 by Funk and Wagnalls Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers Inc.
Harvard University Press: Excerpts from Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander
(Harvard University Press, 1964). Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petroski, Henry.
The evolution of useful things / Henry Petroski.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: A. Knopf, 1992.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77305-0
1. Inventions. 2. Patents. I. Title.
T212.P465 1994
609—dc20 93-6351
Author photograph © Catherine Petroski
v3.1
to my mother,
and to the memory of my father
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
1 How the Fork Got Its Tines
2 Form Follows Failure
3 Inventors as Critics
4 From Pins to Paper Clips
5 Little Things Can Mean a Lot
6 Stick Before Zip
7 Tools Make Tools
8 Patterns of Proliferation
9 Domestic Fashion and Industrial Design
10 The Power of Precedent
11 Closure Before Opening
12 Big Bucks from Small Change
13 When Good Is Better Than Best
14 Always Room for Improvement
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Preface
ther than the sky and some trees, everything I can see from
O
where I now sit is artificial. The desk, books, and computer before
me; the chair, rug, and door behind me; the lamp, ceiling, and
roof above me; the roads, cars, and buildings outside my window, all
have been made by disassembling and reassembling parts of nature. If
truth be told, even the sky has been colored by pollution, and the stand
of trees has been oddly shaped to conform to the space allotted by
development. Virtually all urban sensual experience has been touched by
human hands, and thus the vast majority of us experience the physical
world, at least, as filtered through the process of design.
Given that so much of our perception involves made things, it is
reasonable to ask how they got to look the way they do. How is it that
an artifact of technology has one shape rather than another? By what
process do the unique, and not-so-unique, designs of manufactured
goods come to be? Is there a single mechanism whereby the tools of
different cultures evolve into distinct forms and yet serve the same
essential function? To be specific, can the development of the knife and
fork of the West be explained by the same principle that explains the
chopsticks of the East? Can any single theory explain the shape of a
Western saw, which cuts on the push stroke, as readily as an Eastern
one, which cuts on the pull? If form does not follow function in any
deterministic way, then by what mechanism do the shapes and forms of
our made world come to be?
Such are the questions that have led to this book. It extends an
exploration of engineering that I began in To Engineer Is Human, which
dealt mainly with understanding why made things break, and that I
continued in The Pencil, which traced the evolution of a single artifact
through the cultural, political, and technological vicissitudes of history.
Here I have focused not on the physical failings of any single thing but,
rather, on the implications of failure—whether physical, functional,
cultural, or psychological—for form generally. This extended essay,
which may be read as a refutation of the design dictum that “form
follows function,” has led to considerations that go beyond things
themselves to the roots of the often ineffable creative processes of
invention and design.
As artifacts evolve from artifacts, so do books from books. In writing
this one, I have once again benefited from the physical and intellectual
resources of many libraries and librarians. As always, I acknowledge Eric
Smith, head of Duke University’s Vesic Engineering Library, who
remains ever-patient in the face of my frequently vague requests for
often obscure sources, and even pursues avenues of information I would
never have dreamed of following. Stuart Basefsky, of the Public
Documents Department in Duke’s Perkins Library, helped me get
oriented in patent literature, which proved to be so important for my
case, and the patent repository of the D. H. Hill Library of North
Carolina State University graciously filled my numerous requests for
documents. Several manufacturers, by freely providing their company
histories, catalogues, and ephemera, enabled me to read beyond library
walls and find invaluable documentation of things as they have been and
are. Also, many friends, readers, and collectors generously shared with
me art, facts, and artifacts that have found their way into my work.
Where I have remembered my debts, I have acknowledged them in the
notes at the end of this volume.
Correspondence and conversations with inventors and designers over
the years have certainly shaped the ideas in this book, but, as in so much
invention and design, individual contributions must necessarily remain
largely anonymous, because they have become so threaded into the
fabric of the work that to try to pick out even the most conspicuous of
them would but lead to a lot of loose ends. Where practitioners have
written or spoken for the record, their works are referenced in my
bibliography, as are all those in which I can recall having read support
for my thesis. By their example and encouragement, certain writers,
engineers, and historians of technology have been especially
instrumental in influencing this book, and I must single out Freeman
Dyson, Eugene Ferguson, Melvin Kranzberg, and Walter Vincenti for
their support.
A book naturally takes time and space to write, and I am indebted to
a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for
the former and to a carrel in Perkins Library for the latter. I am grateful
to my supportive editor, Ashbel Green, and to the many others at Alfred
A. Knopf who have read the manuscript with pencils of various colors
and in other ways prepared it for the press. Whatever shortcomings that
remain are naturally my responsibility. Finally, my family once again
understood my need to think and read at home each evening, and they
quietly and constantly added to my store of examples by leaving
interesting thing after interesting thing, from the broken to the bizarre,
on my desk. I am, as always, grateful to Stephen, to Karen, who indexed
this book, and especially to Catherine, who read the book for me at each
stage of its evolution.
William R. Perkins Library
Duke University
April 1992
1
How the Fork Got Its Tines
he eating utensils that we use daily are as familiar to us as our
T
own hands. We manipulate knife, fork, and spoon as automatically
as we do our fingers, and we seem to become conscious of our
silverware only when right-and left-handers cross elbows at a dinner
party. But how did these convenient implements come to be, and why
are they now so second-nature to us? Did they appear in some flash of
genius to one of our ancestors, who yelled “Eureka!,” or did they evolve
as naturally and quietly as did the parts of our bodies? Why is Western
tableware so alien to Eastern cultures, and why do chopsticks make our
hands all thumbs? Are our eating utensils really “perfected,” or is there
room for improvement?
Such questions that arise out of table talk can serve as paradigms for
questions about the origins and evolution of all made things. And
seeking answers can provide insight into the nature of technological
development generally, for the forces that have shaped place settings are
the same that have shaped all artifacts. Understanding the origins of
diversity in pieces of silverware makes it easier to understand the
diversity of everything from bottles, hammers, and paper clips to
bridges, automobiles, and nuclear-power plants. Delving into the
evolution of the knife, fork, and spoon can lead us to a theory of how all
the things of technology evolve. Exploring the tableware that we use
every day, and yet know so little about, provides as good a starting point
for a consideration of the interrelated natures of invention, innovation,
design, and engineering as we are likely to find.
Some writers have been quite unequivocal about the origins of
things. In their Picture History of Inventions, Umberto Eco and G. B.
Zorzoli state flatly that “all the tools we use today are based on things