A table knife also shares functional traits with kitchen knives and wood saws, but the social context in which the table implement is used places it in a different category entirely. There is an element of social intercourse present at the dinner table, where actions are steeped in the conscious and unconscious traditions and superstitions associated with breaking bread, that is simply not present at the kitchen counter or the workshop bench. There the artisan works by and large silently and alone, amid a creative disarray of parts and tools. In contrast, the diners around a table are seldom creating anything but conversation and the other ephemera of a dinner party—a performance in the round in which they are both actors and audience. Indeed, the most essential thing that does take place at a dinner table is not supposed to be creative, but is, rather, expected to conform to the often arbitrary rules of manners, etiquette, and fashion.
These hammers, ranging in size from about seven to eleven inches long, exhibit wooden handles whose once-straight lines were eroded over the years of constant use given them by nineteenth-century Sheffield craftsmen pounding out small work on cutlery. The uneroded parts of the handles show them to have been of a common shape when new, and the different patterns of wear can be attributed at least as much to each workman’s individual grip as to the grain of the wood. (photo credit 9.1)
The consumption of food, like the wearing of clothes, is something we all do. When these things were done by our primitive ancestors, they may have paid less attention to style than to substance. But with the advance of civilization, including in particular the development of class distinctions and the emergence of mass production, the ability to make and the desire to own a variety of things in a variety of prescribed styles came together in the mixed blessing of a consumer society. The social context in which an artifact is used can indeed have a considerable influence on the more decorative and nonessential variations in its form. However, the evolution of functional details is still very much driven by failure in contexts ranging from the genial to the sullen.
In spite of Marx’s astonishment that five hundred different kinds of hammers were made in Birmingham in the 1860s, this was no capitalist plot. Indeed, if there were a plot, it was to not make more. The proliferation of hammer types occurred because there were then, as now, many specialized uses of hammers, and each user wished to possess a tool that was suited as ideally as possible to the tasks he performed perhaps thousands of times each day, but seldom if ever in a formal social context. I have often reflected on the value of special hammers while using the two ordinary ones from my tool chest: a familiar carpenter’s hammer with a claw, and a smaller version that fits in places the larger one does not. The tasks I’ve applied them to have included driving and removing nails, of course, but also opening and closing paint cans, pounding on chisels, tacking down carpets, straightening dented bicycle fenders, breaking bricks, driving wooden stakes, and on and on.
When I use my ordinary hammer for something other than driving or pulling nails, I normally do not do a very good job; the damage that I inflict on the object of my pounding suggests a modification of my hammer for that special purpose. In closing paint-can lids, for example, I have learned to pound carefully if I do not want to dent the top and make it difficult to get an airtight seal; a hammer with a very broad and flat head would be better. In pounding on chisels, I have noticed that my hammer often slips off or misses its mark; a very large-headed mallet would be better. In tacking carpets close to a baseboard, I have either gouged the baseboard, bent the tack, or smashed my thumb; a long and narrow head, magnetized to hold a tack in place, would be better. In trying to straighten out dents in a contoured bicycle fender, I have found that even my smaller hammer has too large and flat a head; a ball-peen hammer would be better. In attempting to break bricks in two by striking them with my hammer’s claw, I have gotten slanted edges at best; a hammer with a chisel claw set more nearly perpendicular to the handle would be better. In pounding wooden stakes into the ground, I have found it difficult to keep a stake’s end from splitting; a hammer with a broader and softer head would be better. In short, if I were doing these things not only now and then on weekends but every day on a job, I would want just the right hammer to do the job just right. If I were to try to accomplish five hundred different things with a single hammer, I might find at least five hundred faults and invent more than five hundred variations of the hammer. And as with the hammer, so with the saw and other tools; the quality of my work and my reputation could suffer if I did not have the proper specialized tools.
Whatever my profession, my social reputation rests more on how I handle silverware than on how I do a hammer. But highly specialized pieces of cutlery have now fallen out of fashion, and so eating with the few that remain can be even trickier than hammering. Since the days when diners brought their own knives and forks to the table are long gone, we are expected to adapt instantly to whatever odd and unusual piece of silverware might be set before us, whether or not its end fits the food and whether or not its handle fits our hand. This state of affairs is as much a result of the evolution of manners, style, and fashion as it is of the rational development of form. Indeed, the latter can actually be curtailed by the external factors of economics and the arbitrary clock of fashion.
When Emily Post advised her 1920s readers to eschew any but the most traditional silverware, she held up the classic patterns of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as models of good taste. When she went further and stated that silver actually made during that period was the epitome, she effectively forced herself to speak ill of the many specialized knives, forks, and spoons that had evolved since the classic silver was made. It was not simply a question of what could be afforded, for surely anyone to whom antique silver was affordable (something “possible only to the longest purse”) could also supplement it with modern implements done tastefully in the same style. No, it appears to have been the ultimate in consumerism—having what the have-nots could not have—that Emily Post captured in her “Blue Book of Social Usage,” by declaring that antique silver was the only real silver. Although by the twenties almost any socially conscious host or hostess could buy and “be very content with modern reproductions that faithfully copy best originals,” only old money or a great deal of new money could hope to possess the real thing.
People no doubt read into Emily Post’s declarations and assertions what they could afford to read, and those with short purses might have looked not to etiquette books but to mail-order catalogues when chosing their silverware patterns. In a 1907 catalogue of the “very best English goods,” silver forks in the Old English, Queen Anne, French Fiddle, King’s, and other patterns are indistinguishable until one looks above the roots of their tines. Indeed, if a sheet of paper were used to cover all but the tines of these forks, the catalogue reader could not tell if they were of the same or different patterns. An array of six silver fish-carving sets shows the same phenomenon; except for their handles, each five-tined fish-serving fork is indistinguishable from the others. Two columns of knives show some variation in the blades, with the pointed tip being reintroduced apparently more for style than for purpose, and blades are more distinguished not by their shape but by their decorative etching. Pickle forks and butter knives are among the few specialized pieces pictured. Prices are given for a variety of sizes of forks and spoons and a limited number of serving pieces, but none are pictured, presumably because they differ only in size and not in form from the standard table fork and spoon. However, the proliferation of patterns was no insidious plot, for the consumer was expected to choose only one of the many, and the manufacturer and the merchant actually had to tie up considerable capital in a widely varied stock. Indeed, the need to offer a multitude of choices was imposed on the merchant to keep the customer from going elsewhere for a pattern chosen for the faddish detail at the end of its handles rather than the functional details on its functional tip.
Notwithstanding the consolidation that occurred wi
thin silverware patterns after 1926, catalogues for the American masses, contemporaneous with Emily Post’s pronouncements about selecting reproductions over new designs, show a variety of patterns that she no doubt had in mind when she observed that “on bad silver the fork-corners are sharp, the prongs thick, and something is added to, or cut away from what is supposed to be a plain design.” Sharp corners and thick tines made forks less easily bent at the table and in the sink of the servantless household, but the thick tines also made the forks less effective to spear food. Such paradoxical developments arose from the focus on choosing a silverware pattern whose supposedly functional ends followed in line with their fashionable handles rather than adhering to the classic designs that had evolved in response to the failure of their predecessors effectively to separate food on the plate and convey it to the mouth.
Whatever the shape of its tines, making a fork out of a more common metal, such as britannia (a compound of tin, copper, and antimony that surpassed pewter in luster and hardness), and plating it with a fixed amount of silver produced an affordable piece of flatware. If thicker tines and more elaborate handles added surface area to be plated, then the plating could be thinner. The often heavily decorated handles that distinguish one silverplate pattern from many others were clearly the focus of illustrations in mail-order catalogues. Frequently the identical bowls of spoons were overlapped as the handles fanned out in a display of choices in the same price category. Elsewhere, handles only were pictured in an arrangement of patterns radiating out from a text announcing “quality” and “charm” and assuring the shopper that “no effort has been spared in making this service correct, individual and charming.” Individuality seems to have been an important selling point, with engraving offered either free or at a nominal charge, and the guarantees of at most a lifetime suggested that the silver was not intended to be bought for one’s descendants but to express one’s own individuality.
In the wake of the government-sponsored simplification system, there appears in such catalogues also to be a diminishing emphasis on specialized pieces of silver, such as oyster forks and fish knives, and a growing emphasis on serving pieces, such as sugar shells and gravy ladles. This was in keeping with a return to dining en famille after the late-nineteenth-century vogue of dîner à la Russe, in which the entire dinner was served in the Russian fashion from a side table, with no serving dishes appearing before the diners. Today, the dexterous use by waiters of the large fork and spoon in concert, rather than the employment of specialized serving pieces, reminds us of how versatile a few pieces of silver can be in practiced hands.
Even in catalogues of some of the best modern silver, handles are much less likely than blades or bowls or tines to be obscured or omitted from an illustration. In an exhaustive catalogue of silverplate patterns intended for collectors, nothing but handles are shown, as if to stress that even to the practiced eye there is little to distinguish knives, spoons, and forks of one individual pattern from another. Designers of tableware were certainly not in complete agreement that knife blades, spoon bowls, and fork tines had evolved to perfection; any designer who thought about it could no doubt have come up with some slightly different solution to the problems of existing cutlery. But it appears that, early in this century, as opposed to the gadget-prone Victorian era, eating implements had clearly become objects more of fashion than of function.
Where fashion does not monopolize form, it is the business end of a tool that gets the most attention. Thus, in a collectors’ handbook of hammers, handles are consistently cropped from the photos of at least a thousand unique tools. And in a book on country craft tools, one illustration of a wide variety of hammers shows several with their handles cut off, and among those handles that are drawn complete there is very little variation compared with that of the heads. Indeed, the illustration raises the question why the handles have not become as specialized as the heads; the answer may be that craftsmen are more interested in how their tools affect the work than in how suited they are to the hand.
The greatest variation in hammer handles appears to be in their length, a feature related more to the magnitude of the hammer’s blow than to its grip. Another illustration of hammers, taken from the exhibition on materials at the National Museum of American History, shows a wider variety of heads but a similarly limited range of handles. There are some unusual handles, notably those made of metal, but there is certainly no attempt to individualize them. This may be in recognition of the fact that no two hands are the same. Besides, the craftsman’s hand will soon adapt to the handle it works with as surely as we adapt to the handles of the silverware set before us. There is little room for style on the workbench itself.
The relationship between fashion and form—or, rather, the influence on the latter of the former—did not escape Staffordshire potters in the eighteenth century. Josiah Wedgwood was one of those potters, and he wrote in his experiment book about how traditional stoneware was priced so low that “potters could not afford to bestow much expense upon it, or make it so good in any respect as the ware they would otherwise admit of; and with regard to elegance of form, that was an object very little attended to.” Of imitation tortoiseshell in particular he wrote that, since “no improvement had been made in this branch for several years, the consumer had grown nearly tired of it; and though the price had been lowered from time to time in order to increase the sale, the expedient did not answer, and something new was wanted to give a little spirit to the business.” But even though the desire to sell more pottery was a clear objective, this is not to say that modifications in its form were made arbitrarily for fashion’s sake. Wedgwood sought to generate business not by the mere fact of novelty or specialization but, rather, by the elimination of shortcomings in conjunction with fashion. Since “people were surfeited” with existing products, Wedgwood wanted in any change “to try for some more solid improvement, as well in the body as the glazes, the colours, and the forms of the articles of our manufacture.”
Wedgwood’s constant experimentation with evolving form and style was motivated by scientific curiosity directed to the elimination of defects as well as to marketing strategy. The scientist Wedgwood was elected to the Royal Society in recognition of his substantive research into matters of the kiln. But throughout much of his long business association with the Liverpool merchant Thomas Bentley in designing, manufacturing, and marketing ornamental wares like vases and urns, Wedgwood was reticent about advertising the significant technological innovations that ultimately made the now famous neoclassical designs possible. Precursors to the successful designs, which were accepted in no small part because neoclassicism was the fashion of the times, were not so widely embraced by the consumer, and it required a certain sense of correction of failure, whether advertised or not, before capitalism was rewarded.
Writing about style in architecture, the nineteenth-century theorist Viollet-le-Duc asserted that “style consists in distinction of form,” and complained that animals expressed this better than the human species. He felt that his contemporaries had “become strangers to those elemental and simple ideas of truth which lead architects to give style to their designs,” and he found it “necessary to define the constituent elements of style, and, in doing so, to carefully avoid those equivocations, those high-sounding but senseless phrases, which have been repeated with all that profound respect which most people profess for that which they do not understand.” Furthermore, he argued that the theory becomes clear only in the example: “If ideas are to be communicated, they must be rendered palpable and tangible. If we wish that style, as regards form, should be comprehended, we must consider form in its simplest expressions.”
Viollet-le-Duc takes the example of coppersmithing, “one of the primitive arts,” and considers an early copper vase made with only an anvil and hammer by a workman paying attention to obviating failure:
His first care is to make a flat, circular bottom for his vase, in order that it may stand firm when it is full;
and to prevent its contents from spilling when it is moved, he contracts its upper orifice and then spreads it suddenly at the edge, to facilitate pouring out. [This] presents the most natural shape, given by the method of fabrication, for such a vase. To enable the vessel to be lifted conveniently, the workman attaches handles to it by means of rivets; but, as the vase requires to be inverted when it is empty, that it may be dried, he so shapes these handles as not to arise above its upper level.
A vase fashioned in this way has style, according to Viollet-le-Duc, but what he suggests—namely, that the vase is fabricated in the coppersmith’s first rational attempt to do so—is highly unlikely. Moreover, some of the details of form that the theorist argues from function would seem to be debatable in their interpretation. For example, it might make more sense to have the handles project slightly above the top, perhaps thickening them to protect against their bending, so as to allow some air to get under the upturned vase and thus assist in drying it. Indeed, the vase that Viollet-le-Duc describes is really an intermediate stage in the evolution of the form he has chosen to study. But, in spite of beginning in medias res, he does go on to show how the form can change first for the better and then for the worse:
But the coppersmiths themselves, in their desire to do better or otherwise than their predecessors, soon quit the line of truth and propriety. There comes then a second coppersmith, who proposes to modify the form of the primitive vase in order to seduce the purchaser with the attraction of novelty; to this end he gives a few extra blows of the hammer and rounds off the body of the vase, which until then had been regarded as perfect. The form is in fact novel, and it becomes fashionable, and everybody in town must have one of the vases made by the second coppersmith. A third, seeing the success of this expedient, goes still further, and makes a third vase, with rounder outlines, for anybody who will buy it. Having quite lost sight of the principle, he becomes capricious and fanciful; he attaches developed handles to this vase, and these he declares to be in the newest taste. It cannot be overturned to be drained without danger of bending these handles, yet every one applauds the new vase, and the third coppersmith is regarded as having singularly perfected his art, while in fact he has only robbed the original work of all its style, and produced an object which is really ugly and comparatively inconvenient.
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are. Page 18