THE TOOTHPICK'S SURPRISING DEBT TO THE SHOE

by Henry Petroski

Sturtevant’s 1863 patent for the manufacture of toothpicks. It relies on a spiral of wood, a feature adopted from his earlier patent for shoe pegs.

The toothpick is a single object made of a single material with, presumably, a single purpose. Anthropologists tell us they have found fossilized teeth with grooves that are inexplicable — unless we assume that people a couple million years ago used something like a toothpick. There have been examples of this found in Africa, Australia, North America, and just about every continent in the world. So tooth picking, according to the anthropologists, must be among the oldest habits known to man.

Tooth picking was also common in the ancient world. People in Asia, Greece, and Rome carried toothpicks that we would associate today with jewelry items — made of metal and worn around the neck on a chain so they could always be well at hand.

One of the most common natural materials used for toothpicks has been the goose quill. The feathers of geese and other birds had been more important for making writing quills, but with the advent of the steel pen, the quill was almost totally displaced by the 1860s. So people who raised lots of geese — especially in countries like France — had to look for possible new uses for their feathers.

Quill toothpick production became partially mechanized in the latter part of the 19th century. But how could you be sure you were getting a toothpick that was clean enough to put in your mouth? To ensure this, a lot of “hygienic” quill toothpicks came to be individually wrapped, as are many wooden toothpicks today. But even when wrapped, quill toothpicks didn’t age well. They became brittle, rendering them virtually useless.

Then along came the wooden toothpick, sending the quill into certain obsolescence. Some of the oldest wooden toothpicks come from Portugal, principally from the Mondego Valley, where there is still a cottage industry of making them by hand from orangewood. The toothpick extended naturally to Brazil — once a Portuguese colony — especially to the state of Pernambuco, which had rich forest resources. It was here that the story of an American toothpick empire began.

Charles Forster (1826–1901) was born into a prominent family from the Boston area. As a young man he began working for an uncle who owned an import-export business dealing in trade between New England and Brazil. The younger Forster noticed that Brazilians carved toothpicks by hand, but he thought the product could be made more economically and efficiently by machine. His plan was to offer up a little competition: he would manufacture wooden toothpicks in New England and export them to Brazil. But Forster was not an inventor and was not prepared to make a toothpick machine himself.

Coincidentally, there was a gentleman working in Boston at the time who was a genius at mechanical things. Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant (1833–1890) was born into a very poor family. Just about the only thing that his parents gave him was a name that suggested that he might be inventive.

Early on he went to work as an apprentice to shoemakers. It was his job to drive wooden pegs into holes in the soles of the shoes to fasten them to the uppers. The pegging looked like stitching superficially, but the holes had actually been made individually with an awl before the wooden pegs were driven into them. It was hard work, and Sturtevant kept thinking that there had to be a better way.

In 1857, Sturtevant patented his first machine to automate the process to a certain extent, but he ran into some problems. The inconsistent grain of the wood sometimes created misshaped pegs, which would then jam the machine or damage the shoe.

His solution was to concentrate on making better pegs, a process that he would patent. He placed a log on a lathe, and as the log rotated, a knife cut off a thin strip of veneer — a continuous strip that did not crack or break. He ended up with a big spiral — which he called a ribbon — sometimes as much as 100 feet long, depending on the diameter of the log, but only the width of a shoe peg thick and the length of one wide. If he beveled both sides of one edge of this ribbon, he could use it as a blank from which to cut shoe pegs with a pointed tip. Pegging machines could then reliably cut and drive neatly formed pegs through the holes in the sole.

A few years later Sturtevant patented the idea of beveling both edges of a ribbon of veneer, from which toothpicks could then be made. Because of his limited resources, Sturtevant sold the rights to this patent to Charlotte Bowman (1835–1902), who was to marry Charles Forster when he returned to Boston from Brazil to start a toothpick business. Although it’s not clear how Forster and his fiancée learned about Sturtevant, what is clear is that his 1863 patent was critical to the development of the toothpick industry in the United States.

It took years for Sturtevant and Forster — working with Charles Freeman, one of Sturtevant’s young mechanics — to eliminate the bugs in their process. But by 1870, it was pretty much perfected. With Sturtevant’s help, Forster identified the best wood to be white birch from Maine, where he set up mills west of the Kennebec River in towns close to the supply. After relocating his factories several times, he finally established permanent ones in Dixfield and Strong.

In the meantime, other inventors wanted to get in on the action. J.C. Brown developed an improvement for cutting splints, which were any small pieces of wood that were thin and long, including things like matchsticks and toothpicks. However, neither Brown nor fellow inventors Silas Noble and James Cooley — with their “Improvement in Tooth-Pick Machines” — could exploit their inventions to make toothpicks because Forster and his wife retained patent protection into 1880. When that ran out, Forster and Freeman, who had become Forster’s principal mechanic, looked for new patent protection. At this time, virtually all toothpicks were flat, with relatively square points. Forster and Freeman wanted to make round toothpicks with true points.

They eventually accomplished this by means of a machine for polishing and compressing toothpicks, making them round and double-pointed. However, the Patent Office didn’t accept the argument that the new product itself was patentable because it believed someone could also make a round toothpick simply by whittling away the end of a flat one.

So an attorney representing Freeman and Forster wrote to the Patent Office explaining how sharpened toothpicks can splinter at the tip, whereas a compressed toothpick did not fray or splinter. After a long debate, the Patent Office finally relented and granted a patent for the compressed toothpick in 1891. A toothpick produced by the Freeman method is a piece of sculpture to behold. The shape of the body tapers gracefully into points. It’s organic. (Unfortunately, round toothpicks today are made by a process that produces a much less elegant shape.)

But as good as something might look, it will always have functional limits. Inventors focus on those limitations and seek to remove them. In the case of the wooden toothpick, it is not well suited to reaching inside crevices between back teeth. In 1923, Russell Lunday attacked this shortcoming and patented what might be called a prosthetic toothpick — a pointed piece of rubber that fitted like a cap onto the tip of the tongue so the user could get to those crevices at the back of the teeth. Other inventors have focused on combining toothpicks with other things. Thus, in 1979 George Adolfson patented a small plastic spoon whose handle could be snapped off at an angle to provide a toothpick after eating.

The toothpick story is more than just a story about toothpicks. It is about the ideas that occupy inventors, designers, and engineers. They may appear to focus on what might be considered minutiae when they look for faults in a product or system and try to improve on it, but this is what invention, design, and development are all about. Whether it is seeking a better toothpick or devising a new computer system, identifying and understanding the problems and shortcomings of the old are what drive the creation and improvement of the new. Seeing how that process has worked in the past for a simple thing helps us to understand how it will work for complex things in the future.

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. This article is adapted from his 2007 Trent R. Dames Lecture at The Huntington, where his papers are housed. His book on the technical and cultural history of the toothpick will be published by Knopf this fall.

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