Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Safety Pins

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Safety pins are so ubiquitous, we take them for granted. But that’s the genius of their design – they work so intuitively they might as well have come from nature. Instead, they were invented by a man who never went to the trouble of patenting them.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca.

Hey, and welcome to The Shorty, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry, so let's get started. You must be at least this tall to enjoy this podcast. Remember the anxiety as a kid at amusement parks? Yes. Around that? I do. You just wanted to be a little taller.

Now you look at it and you're like, wow, what is that? Like are there, you know, there's kids that aren't that tall? It just seems so short now, it was before it was like, oh man, I hope I measure up. You'd like grow your hair out to like make that extra like half an inch or something like that. Get your blowout comb. Get your throw up high. That's exactly right.

Although remember my story is that I was scared of roller coasters until my father finally said, I'm not taking you back here and paying this money until you get on a roller coaster. And then you weren't scared? Well no, I just went on because I was like, I don't want to not come back. And then I loved it of course. And he rolled the dice there. Did you, yeah, my dad took me on Space Mountain when I was like five or something like that and I hate roller coasters as a result.

Really? Still? Yeah. I'm not big on it. Basically the same thing happened to you. I don't remember how old she was, but it was Space Mountain, her dad. And we went back to Space Mountain like years ago to conquer it, to conquer our fears and we did.

We did it. We got hammered it in Tomorrowland and got aboard. But that has nothing to do with safety pins. No, it doesn't. No, safety pins actually have a totally different, equally engrossing story. There was a guy who's actually known as the inventor of the safety pin, chiefly because he invented the safety pin. His name is Walter Hunt and there's a lot of different interpretations of Walter Hunt.

I think this House of Works article kind of misses the mark a little bit. Yeah, what's your take? So he was one of America's great 19th century inventors, number one. Number two, he invented the safety pin, which is that just, if he had just invented the safety pin, that would be something. But he invented the safety pin back in 1849 and if you look at his safety pin invention and the safety pin that you would go by today, it's virtually the same thing. Like the guy right out of the gate invented a perfect version of his invention.

Yeah, this is one of those that's so brilliant in its simplicity. As I imagine, he was just tinkering around with some wire, coiled it around itself and said, hey, that acts as its own spring. So it doesn't need to be two pieces, which is sort of the genius of a safety pin. And then the little clasp, the little safety clasp, that's why it's called a safety pin, keeps little fingers and big fingers, I guess. And toes. And toes from getting pricked and stuck.

And it was just a genius little idea. Yeah, it was. So the legend goes that he was fiddling around with that wire and inadvertently invented the safety pin while he was just kind of keeping his hands busy, trying to figure out how to pay off a $15 debt. I could not find what the debt was for, but it was to a pal. So okay, we'll go with that. But then when he figured out this safety pin was a pretty good idea, he went and patented

it. But then he sold the patent to either that friend or somebody else to pay off the $15 debt, but he sold it for like 400 bucks. Yeah, which did you do the calculation there? No. What is that today? I didn't. Do you want me to just talk for a minute while you type?

I do. Can you do a little tap dance? Yeah, but the point is that $400 back then, and we'll get the number in a sec, was a great deal of money. But obviously, nothing compared to the riches that would have befallen Walter Hunt had he held on to that patent. It would be known as the hunt pin today, probably. And his great-great-grandkids would be billionaire still, I would imagine.

Oh, yeah, if he earned royalties from it and they had kept up the patent, heck yes, or the trademark or something, I'm not sure how they would do it, but I do have a number, Chuck. All right, what is it? Drum roll. It's about $12,000. Yeah. Not bad.

It isn't bad, but so here's the thing. So the guy sold off his patented idea. Sometimes he's reported as not even having patented it, just sold the idea, which is wrong. So he sold the patent for just $12,000. He's often very much characterized as like short-sighted, maybe just like an absent-minded inventor type or something like that. Sure. Okay, maybe you can say that with the safety pin, but he also invented something pretty

huge too, the sewing machine. And this is where it gets kind of like a little cloudy to me. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll clear the clouds out and we'll be back right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so the clouds are still over us, Chuck.

We're about to part them. Okay. I thought you were about to say, we're going to rain down some knowledge. Oh, that's way better. We should, we should retake this part. Everybody with a chance of knowledge. So, so Walter Hunt invented the sewing machine actually back in like 1833, a good, um, almost 20 years before he invented the safety pin and it had like a curved eye needle.

It had the shuttle just basically like the singer sewing machine would later be. He invented it decades before anybody else was making these sewing machines. And so yet again, uh, he's criticized for selling this idea without patenting it or patenting it and not doing anything with it. He, the story I saw was that he did come up with this idea and his daughter pointed out that this machine would put a lot of, um, impoverished women out of work. Oh, interesting. Worked as sewers.

And he said, oh, well, I'm not going to do anything with this and chose not to patent it and abandoned the idea so that it wouldn't even be out there for anybody else to pick up and, and work with. Did he destroy his machine? And what I saw, he didn't even make this prototype. I didn't see that anywhere else, but in this article. Yeah. Because in our own article, it even specifically says his prototype was wooden, which would

lead me to believe that unless someone just, you know, was willy-nilly making things up, that's gotta be true. Right? I don't know. But this is what I'm saying. Things are clouded. We, we parted them some and then they came back. All right.

But either way, the reason that you look at sewing machines today and don't see the word hunt on them is just another sort of chink in his armor as a really brilliant guy who didn't see the big picture economically. Or didn't want to put poor women out of work. Right. Did I just overlook that? Yes. So you're saying it was noble.

That's how I'm taking it. Well, I hope so. That would be a great, you know, I like that better than, eh, I didn't think it was very good. Right. Exactly. Maybe because it was made of wood. Yeah.

If he did prototype it, I'll say yes, it was probably made of wood. But the reason why it says singer is because a man named Isaac Singer came along. There were actually two, two dudes, two businessmen, Elias Howe and Isaac Singer, and they were in a battle with each other to control this patent in the 1850s. So what I couldn't tell is if they legit invented this thing or if they ripped off hunt somehow. Yeah. Not they, it would have been Elias Howe. He was the one who held the patent.

Okay. So Isaac Singer was just making machines based on the same designs, ignoring Howe's patent because for some reason somehow he knew that, um, that it was actually William Hunt who had invented the sewing machine decades before. Wow. So they went to court and Isaac Singer said, hunt, come in here and demonstrate that you, you did this and you can get the patent and then I'll ignore your patent too. And the judge actually ruled that he, that yes, William Hunt was indeed the inventor

of the sewing machine, but it was too late to retroactively file a patent. I wonder if there's enough here for a movie. They made one about the guy who, uh, who created the intermittent setting on the windshield wipers. Yeah. And they made one, uh, what's her face? Jennifer, uh, Aniston.

Lawrence. Right. Was in the movie about the inventor lady. Oh yeah. Joy Mangano. Yeah. So maybe there's enough here. It would like call it so what?

No, you wouldn't. And at the end of the trailer, it's spelled out and you would hear the sewing machine and it would sew it out the title. I don't, I don't, maybe. Maybe this should just be a trailer. So what seems like a working title, right? That like some producer comes in and changes and gets paid a billion dollars for it. Right.

And then it would be called the Isaac Singer follies. So the other thing about, uh, Walter Hunt, he invented plenty of other stuff too. A foot pedal alarm to warn people that a streetcar was coming, uh, for sure. An antipodian walking device. Yeah. And that, I had no idea what that was, but, uh, apparently it's like the human fly, like suction cup shoes. Right.

It's pretty amazing. And today, well, not today, but say back in the seventies, if you hung out with punks, you probably saw a lot of safety pins and you can thank Walter Hunt for that little fashion accessory too. Yeah. What was the deal? They would, that was just, you would put a bunch of safety pins. I was not cool enough to do that stuff.

So there's a dispute over who came up with this supposedly Richard Hell, one of the original punk rockers, he accessorized a lot and he accessorized with safety pins. So some people say, well, it was Richard Hell that came up with it. But apparently Johnny Rotten from the sex pistols has disputed that and said that it was actually out of necessity to keep the arse on your trousers from falling off. Cause they just wore beat up clothes. Yeah. Because they were gutter punks.

Didn't people actually put safety pins through their face? Yeah. Or am I making that up? Well, Walter Hunt did not like that, his ghost was very upset by this, but no one could see that. Wow. So from the safety pin to the sewing machine to Sid Vicious. Yeah.

That's the logical order of operation. It really is. American inventors. Ta-da. If you want to, you got anything else? No. I just know that I want to go out and get some anti-potean shoes. No, I do too, man.

You just climb up a building and say, thank you, William Hunt. Let's see. If you want to get in touch with us, just go to our website, okay, StuffVicheno.com. It's got all of our social media links, and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast.housestuffworks.com. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my friends give you the favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.