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

  Knives, like all artifacts, have over time been subject to the vagaries of style and fashion, especially in the more decorative aspects of their handles. These English specimens date (left to right) from approximately 1530, 1530, 1580, 1580, 1630, and 1633, and they show that in one form or another the functional tip of the knife remained a constant feature until the introduction of the fork provided an alternate means of spearing food. (photo credit 1.2)

  By using one knife to steady the roast in the middle of the table while the other knife cut off a slice, the diners could help themselves without touching the common food. But a sharp, pointed knife is not a very good holding device, as we can easily learn by trying to eat a T-bone with a steak knife in each hand. If the holding knife is to press the steak against the plate, we must use scant effort to keep it in place, and this can become tiring; if the holding knife is to spear the steak, we will soon find it rotating in place tike a wheel on an axle. As a result, using the fingers to steady food being cut was not uncommon.

  Frustrations with knives, especially their shortcomings in holding meat steady for cutting, led to the development of the fork. While ceremonial forks were known to the Greeks and Romans, they apparently had no names for table forks, or at least did not use them in their writings. Greek cooks did have a “flesh-fork … to take meat from a boiling pot,” and this kitchen utensil “had a resemblance to the hand, and was used to prevent the fingers from being scalded.” Ancient forklike tools also included the likes of hay forks and Neptune’s trident, but forks are assumed not to have been used for dining in ancient times.

  The first utilitarian food forks had two prongs or tines, and were employed principally in the kitchen and for carving and serving. Such forks pierced the meat like a pointed knife, but the presence of two tines kept the meat from moving and twisting too easily when a piece was being sliced off. Although this advantage must also have been recognized in prehistoric eras, when forked sticks were almost as easy to come by as straight ones for skewering meat over the fire, the fork as an eating utensil was a long time in coming. It is believed that forks were used for dining in the royal courts of the Middle East as early as the seventh century and reached Italy around the year 1100. However, they did not come into any significant service there until about the fourteenth century. The inventory of Charles V of France, who reigned from 1364 to 1380, listed silver and gold forks, but with an explanation “that they were only used for eating mulberries and foods likely to stain the fingers.” Table forks for conveying a variety of foods to the mouth moved westward to France with Catherine de Médicis in 1533, when she married the future King Henry II, but the fork was thought to be an affectation, and those who lost half their food as it was lifted from plate to mouth were ridiculed. It took a while for the new implement to gain widespread use among the French.

  Not until the seventeenth century did the fork appear in England. Thomas Coryate, an Englishman who traveled in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany in 1608, published three years later an account of his adventures in a book entitled, in part, Crudities Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months. At that time, when a large piece of meat was set on a table in England, the diners were still expected to partake of this main dish by slicing off a portion each while holding the roast steady with the fingers of their free hand. Coryate saw it done differently in Italy:

  I observed a custom in all those Italian cities and towns through which I passed, that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels, neither do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian, and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat. For while with their knife which they hold in one hand they cut the meat out of the dish, they fasten the fork, which they hold in their other hand, upon the same dish; so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the company of any others at the meal, should unadvisedly touch the dish of meat with his fingers from which all at the table do cut, he will give occasion of offense unto the company, as having transgressed the laws of good manners, insomuch that for his error he shall be at least brow beaten if not reprehended in words. This form of eating I understand is generally used in all places of Italy; their forks being for the most part made of iron or steel, and some of silver, but those are used only by gentlemen. The reason of this their curiosity is, because the Italian cannot by any means indure to have his dish touched with fingers, seeing all men’s fingers are not alike clean. Hereupon I myself thought to imitate the Italian fashion by this forked cutting of meat, not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany, and oftentimes in England since I came home.

  Coryate was jokingly called “Furcifer,” which meant literally “fork bearer,” but which also meant “gallows bird,” or one who deserved to be hanged. Forks spread slowly in England, for the utensil was much ridiculed as “an effeminate piece of finery,” according to the historian of inventions John Beckmann. He documented further the initial reaction to the fork by quoting from a contemporary dramatist who wrote of a “fork-carving traveller” being spoken of “with much contempt.” Furthermore, no less a playwright than Ben Jonson could get laughs for his characters by questioning, in The Devil Is an Ass, first produced in 1616,

  The laudable use of forks,

  Brought into custom here as they are in Italy,

  To the sparing of napkins.

  But the new fashion was soon being taken more seriously, for Jonson could also write, in Volpone, “Then must you learn the use and handling of your silver fork at meals.”

  Putting aside acceptance and custom, what makes the fork work, of course, are its tines. But how many tines make the best fork, and why? Something with a single tine is hardly a fork, and would be no better than a pointed knife for spearing and holding food. The toothpicks at cocktail parties may be considered, like sharpened sticks, rudimentary forks, but most of us have experienced the frustrations of manipulating a toothpick to pick up a piece of shrimp and dip it in sauce. If the shrimp does not fall off, it rotates in the sauce cup. If the shrimp does not drop into the cup, we must contort our hand to hold the toothpick, shrimp, and dripping sauce toward the vertical while trying to put the hors d’oeuvre on our horizontal tongue. The single-tined fork is not generally an instrument of choice, but that is not to say it does not have a place. Butter picks are really single-tined forks, but, then, we do want a butter pick to release the butter easily. Escargot and nut picks might also be classified as single-pronged forks, but, then, there is hardly room for a second tine in a snail’s snug spiral or a pecan shell’s interstices.

  The two-pronged fork is ideal for carving and serving, for a roast can be held in place without rotating, and the fork can be slid in and out of the meat relatively easily. The implement can be moved along the roast with little difficulty and can also convey slices of meat from carving to serving platter with ease. The carving fork functions as it was intended, leaving little to be desired, and so it has remained essentially unchanged since antiquity. But the same is not true of the table fork.

  As the fork grew in popularity, its form evolved, for its shortcomings became evident. The earliest table forks, which were modeled after kitchen carving forks, had two straight and longish tines that had developed to serve the principal function of holding large pieces of meat. The longer the tines, the more securely something like a roast could be held, of course, but longish tines are unnecessary at the dining table. Furthermore, fashion and style dictated that tableware look different from kitchenware, and so since the seventeenth century the tines of table forks have been considerably shorter and thinner than those of carving forks.

  In order to prevent the rotation of what was being held for cutting, the two tines of the fork were necessarily some distance apart, and this spacing was somewhat standardized. However, small loose pieces of food fell through the space between the tines and thus could not be picked up by the fork unless speared. Furthermore, the very advantage of two tines fo
r carving meat, their ease of removal, made it easy for speared food to slip off early table forks. Through the introduction of a third tine, not only could the fork function more efficiently as something like a scoop to deliver food to the mouth, but also food pierced by more tines was less likely to fall off between plate and mouth.

  If three tines were an improvement, then four were even better. By the early eighteenth century, in Germany, four-tined forks looked as they do today, and by the end of the nineteenth century the four-tined dinner fork became the standard in England. There have been five- and six-tined forks, but four appears to be the optimum. Four tines provide a relatively broad surface and yet do not feel too wide for the mouth. Nor does a four-tined fork have so many tines that it resembles a comb, or function like one when being pressed into a piece of meat. Wilkens, the German silversmith, does make a modern five-tined dinner fork, but it appears to have been designed more for fashion than function, since the pattern (called Epoca) is marketed as being “unique in its entirety and in every detail” and “full of generous, massive strength.” The fork’s selling point seems to be its unusual appearance rather than its effectiveness for eating. Many contemporary silverware patterns have three-tined dinner forks for similar reasons, but some go so far in rounding and tapering the tines, thus softening the lines of the fork, that it is almost impossible to pick up food with it.

  The evolution of the fork in turn had a profound impact on the evolution of the table knife. With the introduction of the fork as a more efficient spearer of food, the pointed knife tip became unnecessary. But many artifacts retain nonfunctional vestiges of earlier forms, and so why did not the knife? The reason appears to be at least as much social as technical. When everyone carried a personal knife not only as a singular eating utensil but also as a tool and a defensive weapon, the point had a purpose well beyond the spearing of food. Indeed, many a knife carrier may have preferred to employ his fingers for lifting food to his mouth rather than the tip of his most prized possession. According to Erasmus’s 1530 book on manners, it was not impolite to resort to fingers to help yourself from the pot as long as you “use only three fingers at most” and you “take the first piece of meat or fish that you touch.” As for the knife, the young were admonished, “Don’t clean your teeth with your knife.” A French book of advice to students recognized the implicit threat involved in using a weapon at the table, and instructed its readers to place the sharp edge of their knife facing toward themselves, not their neighbor, and to hold it by its point in passing it to someone else. Such customs have influenced how today’s table is set and how we are expected to behave at it. In Italy, for example, when one is eating with a fork alone, it is correct to rest the free hand in full view on the table edge. Though this might be considered poor manners irr America, the custom is believed to have originated in the days when the visible hand showed one’s fellow diners that no weapon was being held in the lap.

  It is said to have been Cardinal Richelieu’s disgust with a frequent dinner guest’s habit of picking his teeth with the pointed end of his knife that drove the prelate to order all the points of his table knives ground down. In 1669, as a measure to reduce violence, King Louis XIV made pointed knives illegal, whether at the table or on the street. Such actions, coupled with the growing widespread use of forks, gave the table knife its now familiar blunt-tipped blade. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the blade curved into a scimitar shape, but this contour was to be modified over the next century to become less weaponlike. The blunt end became more prominent, not merely to emphasize its bluntness but, since the paired fork was likely to be two-tined and so not an efficient scoop, to serve as a surface onto which food might be heaped for conveying to the mouth. Peas and other small discrete foods, which had been eaten by being pierced one by one with a knife point or a fork tine, could now be eaten more efficiently by being piled on the knife blade, whose increasingly backward curve made it possible to insert the food-laden tip into the mouth with less contortion of the wrist. During this time, the handles on some knife-and-fork sets became pistol-shaped, thus complementing the curve of the knife blade but making the fork look curiously asymmetrical.

  With the beginning of the nineteenth century, English table-knife blades came to be made with nearly parallel straight sides, perhaps in part as a consequence of the introduction of steam power during the Industrial Revolution and the economy of process in forming this shape out of ingots, but perhaps even more because the fork had evolved into the scooper and shoveler of food, and the knife was to be reserved for cutting. The blunt-nosed straight-bladed knife, which was often more efficient as a spreading than a cutting utensil, remained in fashion throughout the nineteenth century. However, unless the cutting edge of the blade extended some distance below the line of the handle around which the fingers curled, only the tip of the blade was fully practical for cutting and slicing. This shortcoming caused the knife’s bottom edge to evolve into the convex shape of most familiar table knives of today. The top edge serves no purpose other than stiffening the blade against bending, and since this has not been found to be wanting, there has been essentially no change in the shape of that edge of the knife for two centuries.

  Early two-tined forks worked well for holding meat being cut but were not useful for scooping up peas and other loose food. The bulbous tip of the knife blade evolved to provide an efficient means of conveying food to the mouth, with the curve of the blade reducing the amount of wrist contortion needed to use the utensil thus. These English sets date (left to right) from approximately 1670, 1690, and 1740. (photo credit 1.3)

  With the introduction of three- and four-tined forks, the latter sometimes called “split spoons,” it was no longer necessary or fashionable to use the knife as a food scoop, and so its bulbous curved blade reverted to more easily manufactured shapes. However, habit and custom persisted at the dinner table, and the functionally inefficient knife was used throughout the nineteenth century by less refined diners for putting food in the mouth. Left to right, these sets date from about 1805, 1835, and 1880. (photo credit 1.4)

  Whereas the shapes of table knives have evolved to remove their existing failings and shortcomings, kitchen knives have changed little over the centuries. Their blades have remained pointed, the shape into which they naturally evolved by successive correction of faults from flint shards. The inadequacy of the common table knife to be all things to all people is emphasized when we eat a food like steak. Since the table knife is generally not sharp-pointed enough to work its way in tight curves around pieces of gristle and bone, we are brought special implements that are more suited to the task at hand. Cutting up a steak is very much like kitchen work, and so the steak knife has evolved back from the table knife to look like a kitchen knife.

  The modern table knife and fork have evolved through a kind of symbiotic relationship, but the general form of the spoon has developed more or less independently. The spoon is sometimes claimed to be the first eating utensil, since solid food could easily be eaten with the bare fingers and the knife is thought to have had its beginnings as a tool or weapon rather than as an eating utensil per se. It is reasonable to assume that the cupped hand was the first spoon, but we all know how inefficient it can be. Empty clam, oyster, or mussel shells can be imagined to have been spoons, with distinct advantages over the cupped hand or hands. Shells could hold liquid longer than cramping hands, and they enabled the latter to be kept clean and dry. But shells have their own shortcomings. In particular, it is not easy to fill a shell from a bowl of liquid without getting the fingers wet, and so a handle would naturally have been added. Spoons formed out of wood could incorporate a handle integrally, and the very word “spoon” comes from the Anglo-Saxon “spon,” which designated a splinter or chip of wood. With the introduction of metal casting to make spoons, the shape of bowls was not limited to those naturally occurring in nature and thus could evolve freely in response to real or perceived shortcomings, and to fashion. But even havin
g been shaped, from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, successively round, triangular (with the handle at the apex, sometimes said to be fig-shaped), elliptical, elongated triangular (with the handle at the base), ovoid, and elliptical, the bowl of the spoon has never been far from the shape of a shell.

  The use of the knife, fork, and spoon in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Europe has influenced some persistent differences in their use by Europeans and Americans today. The introduction of the fork produced an asymmetry in tableware, and the question of which implement a diner’s right and left hand held could no longer be considered moot. With identical knives in each hand, the diner was able to cut and carry food to the mouth with either knife, but, whether by custom or natural inclination, right-handedness may be assumed always to have prevailed, and so the knife in the right hand not only performed the cutting, which took much more dexterity than merely holding the meat steady on the plate, but also speared the cut-off morsel to convey it to the mouth. Because it did not need to be pointed, the left-hand knife was sometimes blunt-ended and used as a spatula to scoop up looser food or slices of meat. When the fork gained currency, it displaced the noncutting and relatively passive knife in the left hand, and in time the function of the knife in the right hand changed. With its point blunted, it was used only as a cutter and shoveler, and the fork held meat that was being cut and speared it for lifting to the mouth, a relatively easy motion with the left hand, even for a right-handed person.