There are products we use every day that make our lives
easier. I am not talking about big
obvious things like the car or the plane or the computer but little things like
scissors. Think about it, life would be much more inconvenient without the
simple scissor. Scissors come in various sizes from tiny to gigantic. Tiny scissors for your nails, scissors for
surgery, scissors for kitchen purposes, scissors for cutting paper, scissors
for cutting cloth, and scissors for industrial purposes.
Scissors are used by blue collar workers, white collar
workers, by surgeons and by first graders.
I use scissors all of the time to cut articles and ads out of magazines
and newspapers. I love to sit in the Bud
Cave on a Sunday morning with the New York Times and a pair of
scissors. I cut book reviews out the New
York Times Book Section and stack them up nearby for books I want to read a in
the future. The Sunday New York Times
has “New York Times Magazine and T- Magazine and the Sunday Review. I am always cutting out articles, opinions,
editors and ads that have websites. I do the cutouts so I
don’t want to save the entire Sunday New York Times, which as you know is a big
paper. I just want to save 4 or 5 items
that I will check out in more detail later.
Ultimately these cutout items will be tossed but for now I will stack
them somewhere first and then get back to them.
I can tear these items out of the paper with my hands, but I am not
particularly good at that and inevitably I tear part of the article or even if
I keep the article or ad intact, I end up with sloppy, jagged edges.
I have a penholder cup on the lamp table next to my ragged
leather chair in the Bud Cave. In it I
have a couple of pencils, three or four blue pens, a couple of black pens, a
green pen and a red pen or two. I also
have a pair of scissors. I use the scissors to cut out the articles and ads. I have a similar cup on my Bud Cave
desk.
I read The New Yorker Magazine weekly and frequently
cut out a cartoon or two. Earlier this
week I mailed my Canadian friend Ray, who lives in Palm Desert, a New Yorker
cartoon about Canadians. He may not like
it but I thought it was funny, I cut it out of the magazine with scissors. A cartoon I cut out from the New Yorker:
You know those 12 ounce bags of coffee you buy at Starbucks
or the grocery store? I needed to open
a new one this morning, a Dunkin Doughnuts Columbia Supreme if you must know,
and I opened the bag with a pair of scissors I keep in the Bud Cave coffee room.
When I get a haircut, they use scissors. When I want to
remove a stray thread from a shirt, I use scissors. Think about how often you use scissors and
for how many different purposes. Its
amazing. I am getting more excited about
scissors as I am writing this article. I
want to walk through the house here in Salt Lake looking for scissors. I want to count how many pairs of scissorsthere
are in this house. Now that would be
something important to know.
I googled “scissors” and learned from Wikipedia that
scissors have been around since 1,500 BC.
I think I have that pair in the coffee room. Wikipedia says the following about scissors:
It is most likely that scissors were invented around 1500 BC
in ancient Egypt. The earliest known scissors appeared in Mesopotamia 3,000
to 4,000 years ago. These were of the 'spring scissor' type comprising two
bronze blades connected at the handles by a thin, flexible strip of curved
bronze which served to hold the blades in alignment, to allow them to be
squeezed together, and to pull them apart when released.
Spring scissors continued to be used in Europe until the
16th century. However, pivoted scissors of bronze or iron, in which the blades
were pivoted at a point between the tips and the handles, the direct ancestor
of modern scissors, were invented by the Romans around 100.[2] They entered
common use not only in ancient Rome, but also in China, Japan, and Korea, and
the idea is still used in almost all modern scissors.
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, spring scissors were
made by heating a bar of iron or steel, then flattening and shaping its ends
into blades on an anvil. The center of the bar was heated, bent to form the
spring, then cooled and reheated to make it flexible.
William Whiteley & Sons (Sheffield) Ltd. is officially
recognized as first starting the manufacture of scissors in the year 1760,
although it is believed the business began trading even earlier. The first
trade-mark, 332, was granted in 1791.
Pivoted scissors were not manufactured in large numbers
until 1761, when Robert Hinchliffe produced the first pair of modern-day
scissors made of hardened and polished cast steel. He lived in Cheney Square,
London and was reputed to be the first person who put out a signboard
proclaiming himself "fine scissor manufacturer".
During the 19th century, scissors were hand-forged with
elaborately decorated handles. They were made by hammering steel on indented
surfaces known as bosses to form the blades. The rings in the handles, known as
bows, were made by punching a hole in the steel and enlarging it with the
pointed end of an anvil.
In 1649, in a part of Sweden that is now in Finland, an
ironworks was founded in the "Fiskars" hamlet between Helsinki and
Turku. In 1830, a new owner started the first cutlery works in Finland, making,
among other items, scissors with the Fiskars trademark. In 1967, Fiskars
Corporation introduced new methods to scissors manufacturing.
That is pretty interesting stuff, don’t you think? I am going trim my eyebrows.