Faster horses

Maybe I've been under a rock for the last five decades, but when I saw this safety pin on a clothing tag, I was flabbergasted. I had never seen such a pin. Someone had tinkered with Walter Hunt's design, patented in April 1849 and pretty much unchanged since then, and made it - better. It felt like someone had taken on the sacred.

So it got me thinking...
...which as we know is potentially dangerous. However, this time around I think the world is safe from my musings.

Could it be that we accept things are the way they are because that's the best they can be, and we intuitively recognise they are in their optimal state because of their simplicity and elegance? Or is it because nobody has had the inspiration to think differently about the simple things which surround us? And have we not improved them because we are so used to the way they are?

A brief history of the safety pin
Humble beginnings
Ah, Wikipedia, you beauty. Thanks to you I learned that the invention of the safety pin was a "needs must" exercise - that Walter Hunt fellow owed someone $15 and was flat broke himself. He sold his design for $400 to W. R. Grace and Company and paid off the $15 debt, making a handsome profit of $385 in the bargain. Too bad for him, I suppose, the company he sold the design to must have made millions of dollars from the subsequent sale of safety pins. But how was he to know? And could he have possibly realised how ubiquitous his invention would become? And maybe he really needed to repay that debt at the time.

Safety pin as covert social agent
This delightful tribute to the safety pin in the usually pretty highbrow magazine The Atlantic raises it from the simply functional to a way of triggering childhood memories, and captures the times in society when it actually became a symbol of protest. Living in South Africa, I wasn't aware that in late 2016 people in the US began wearing safety pins as a way of expressing their outrage at what was happening post-election. I do remember that safety pins were an essential element in any self-respecting punk rocker's wardrobe, holding pants, t-shirts and body parts together. So safety pins as a means of social expression - really? Yes, really.

Variations on the safety pin over the years
To be charitable, let's call those variations slight. Safety pins have barely changed at all over the centuries. Until this baby pin came along, nobody seems to have really messed with the basic design. Sure, they've produced larger, more decorative pins such as this one I used to have on a kilt I wore as a child.

Please don't ask why I've kept it all these years. I have no idea, other than it's nifty.

Other changes are more about colour, size (oversized and smaller) and and design material (say brass rather than steel). I always felt special as a child having one of those small brass safety pins. Somehow they felt more sophisticated than regular safety pins. To think they now come in colours, red to boot!

Just for fun, I've thrown in the dry cleaner's special. I have no idea why, but they insist on attaching wool to the safety pins they use to attach the label to the clean item of clothing. Like I might miss the pin if it didn't have this bright wool on? It must at least keep someone employed tying the wool on....

Faster horses?

I'm reminded in a backwards way of the kick-in-the-butt non Henry Ford quote (non, because apparently there is no evidence he actually said it on how he came up with the idea for cars in the first place - "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Maybe the baby pin is the equivalent of a faster horse, not a revolutionary shift in moving people around like the invention of the automobile. But it's an improvement nevertheless.

What other "safety pins" and "faster horses" do we have in our lives? Things which are useful, we use all the time and which we've grown used to because they've always been "like this", but maybe could be improved in a way that helps the planet and improves the user experience?