Friday, February 3, 2012

Origin Stories

Scissors.

A man named Barry Blockston was working at a restaurant in New York in 1913. Everyday he’d get new shipments in from port of the freshest seafood. Large crates would arrive full of shrimp, clams, salmon…, but the restaurant was best known for its king crab.

Barry wasn’t the richest guy around, so when he had to open boxes he would usually use his kitchen knives. Don’t worry, he washed them afterwards. But he’d use his kitchen wear to cut through cardboard, plastic straps, cans, tin… and after a while his knives started to dull out a bit. He was making decent money, but was still tight on budget. He was afraid that if he ruined the knives he would eventually run out and have nothing to use for his cooking.

Being resourceful, Barry tried other tools. Hammers were fairly successful. Twisty wine corks were useless. Pens and pencils wouldn’t cut through anything. Can openers only worked on the cans. Tweezers broke in half. The handle of a frying pan was too dull. And when Barry started losing his patience, trying to rip things with his bare hands would only open cardboard boxes.

So after a week of trying to work with the problem to come up with a solution, Barry was preparing some of his famous King Crab Casserole. He was busy pulling the meat from the inside a crab’s arm when suddenly his hand slipped and his finger got cut on the edge of the claw! Barry was enraged. Hadn’t his hands been through enough abuse?! Barry reached down and picked up the accursed claw that had attacked him. He looked at the jagged edges within the claw and saw how tightly and sharply they fit together. Then an idea dawned on him.

At first trying to cut boxes open with the claw didn’t work. The claw was too frail and would break. So Barry decided to remove the bottom claw from the arm and fill the remaining claw with some pieces of bread from the week before. He then duct taped the claw shut with the bread inside. It worked better.

Cardboard was easy enough to get through, but cutting cords became a challenge. Barry looked at the craps claw again, examining it closely. He picked up the under hook of the claw he had removed to use the main claw as a knife. Grabbing a new claw complete with the under-claw, Barry then attempted to cut by pinching the upper and lower claws together and serrating the cords. It worked.

When Barry got wealthier, he decided to go buy new cutting knives. Opening boxes was no longer a challenge, but there was always risk with using knives to cut cords and random wires. Then late one night while Barry was cleaning up his restaurant, he decided to try out something kind of random. He took two knives and attached them to a crap’s claw. Where the upper claw would be he put one knife and where the lower claw would be he put the second knife. He took a piece of string and slowly brought the knives together. It worked!

Later Barry studied the inner workings of a can opener to refine his “Serrators”. Other workers in his restaurant started using them as well and soon Barry’s invention was patented. And that is how Scissors came to be.

Post-It Notes

In the early sixties there was a girl named Penny Lane living in Nebraska. Penny was a younger girl working at a local diner. Penny was a sweet girl who liked to talk a lot, but she was always getting distracted and forgetting people’s orders. She would write them down on slips of paper, but the papers were always falling on the floor. Then the chefs would get angry at her and the customers would complain about not getting their food. Penny’s manager threatened to fire her if she didn’t get her act together. So Penny decided to come up with a different way to keep the slips of paper from falling on the ground and getting lost.

Paper clips always went missing. She was also kind of a cluts and would drop them on the floor, slipping over them occasionally to pick up an order. Clothes hangers worked for a little while, but transferring slips of paper out of them and putting new paper in them was a challenge during the lunch time rush hour. Her mom also didn’t appreciate her stealing from their laundry room.

Penny was exhausted and beyond frustration. She was worried she would get fired and then her mom wouldn’t let her go out to parties with her friends on the weekends. Penny got desperate and sat up late one night trying to come up with something that might work.

The next day she brought a pack of bubble gum to work. She was smiling particularly wide that day. When the first order came in the cook went to grab it from the line it was hanging on… and got chewed gum on his fingers. Penny was fired later that evening.

The next day a young boy named Jude Haze was called in as a replacement waiter. Jude had recently invented a strong adhesive glue in a chemistry class that semester. When he saw the disarray of slips of paper falling on the ground, he decided it would be the perfect place to test it out. At first the adhesive was too slippery and didn’t stick well. The chef accused Jude of slobbering over the paper. Jude told the chef he couldn’t help it because the burgers he was cooking were so juicy and full of flavor. The chef forgave Jude and Jude went back home to fine-tune his work.

At last the adhesive worked and the chef was so amazed by Jude’s invention that he called his uncle Ernie from the Paper factory and scheduled an appointment for Jude to meet with him. And that is how Post-Its were invented. 

1 comment:

  1. You're adorkable. =) Fine writing entertainment, here.

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