Henry Petroski on the Toothpick

Henry Petroski is an unusual author. A delight to read, he analyzes the engineering and origin of everyday objects and writes about them in a fascinating way. His latest book is about the toothpick, its origins and the various machines that were made to produce them. A short excerpt can be found at The American:

The Glorious Toothpick
The plain wooden toothpick is among the sim�plest of manufactured things. It consists of a single part, made of a single material, and is intended for a single purpose, from which it takes its name. But simple things do not necessarily come easily, and the story of the mass-produced toothpick is one of preparation, inspiration, invention, marketing, competition, success and failure in a global econ�omy, and changing social customs and cultural values. In short, the story of the toothpick is a par�adigm for American manufacturing.

Early wooden toothpicks were found objects, each fashioned ad hoc from a broken twig or stalk with a pointed end. Often, the other end of the twig was chewed until its fibers separated to form a primitive toothbrush called a chew-stick. Some cultures, like the Japanese, developed rigid rules about how such sticks were held and used.

In medieval Portugal, a cottage industry developed to produce straightforward hand�made toothpicks, and these splints of orange�wood gained a reputation for being the best in the world. Toothpicks made in the Portuguese tra�dition were common in Brazil in the mid-19th century when Charles Forster, an American work�ing in the import-export trade, found them being crafted and used by natives there. It was a time when the manufacture of just about everything was becoming mechanized in America, and Forster believed that toothpicks could be mass-produced in New England at a cost that would allow them even to be exported to Brazil and compete with the handmade kind.

An interesting read -- I'll have to pick up the book from the Library; have always made a point to read his work.