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.
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.
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.
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