About Common Things

G. GEORGE OSTROM / For the Hungry Horse News

Do you care who invented the safety pin? Got one of my main Christmas presents last Saturday, a book which Iris ordered from National Geographic, titled "An Uncommon History of Common Things," written by Bethanne Patrick and John Thompson. Before telling you a few uncommon things I've learned already, there is a small point to clarify.

A plagiarizer is someone who takes other people's writings or ideas and presents them as his own. The word plagiarize comes from Latin "plagiarius' meaning "kidnapper." Doing this is a professional no-no and has caused authors to be fired and disgraced; however, if a writer uses the work of others and cites the sources, that is honest research. This column is based on the book cited above, mixed in with my personal ruminations.

Anthropologists know ancient Mycenaean's developed a spring-catch for fasteners called "fibula," which disappeared in the late Middle Ages. Centuries later, an American fella named Walter Hunt was messing around in 1849 with some wire and produced what we now call a 'safety pin." Billions were sold and still are. Alas! Walter didn't think his idea was much good so he sold the rights for $400.

Many common things we take for granted were discovered accidentally. Take Ivory soap for example. Hundreds of years B.C., Hittites in Asia Manor learned to wash themselves using water and ashes from the soapwort plant. Better soap came along in about 600 B.C. when seafaring Phoenicians mixed alkalis and fat under heat to produce hydrophilic. How does soap work we wonder? Hydrophilic molecules in soapy water attach themselves to whatever isn't water, e.g., dirt, thus with the dirt suspended in the molecules it can be rinsed off. If you have spent much of you life wondering how soap works. There it is.

Humans kept improving on soap, eventually adding colors and scents. By 800 A.D. Spain led the world in its manufacture, but only rich people could afford some. Poor folks probably didn't smell quite as good; however prices dropped in the late 18th Century when a French chemist discovered how to make lye (alkaline) from table salt. Then a worker at Harley Proctor's European soap factory forgot to turn off a mixing vat so a lot more air was added to the soap … but it floated. Hooray! The world had Ivory.

What about aspirin? The world's best known medication was not invented in its present form until the 1890s when a chemist working for the Bayer Company in Cologne, Germany, was trying to find something to help his father's arthritis. Instead of using the widely known willow back and twigs which had helped people for thousands of years, he extracted salicin from meadowsweet (genus Spiaea). Bayer got it on the market in 1899 as powder and pills in 1915. It held the rights until 1921, while we were still mad at Germany for WW I, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled since the name was so widely known, no company could claim it. Others began making "aspirin,"

Some form of "football" has been around in most societies including China, Central America, Greece, and Italy since before 300 B.C. Romans may have introduced a version to the British, who by Middle Ages played "mellays' (melees), where large numbers of people tried to throw, punch, kick, or run with an air-filled animal bladder. Shrove Tuesday became a time sorta like our Super Bowl Sunday, only hundreds of men played the game with goals half a mile apart and went on for hours and hours … maybe days. Don't know if they had umpires and bleachers, but likely beer.

"Brawling football matches' continued in the 19th Century where according to a writer of that time, "… the players kick each other in the shins without the least ceremony and some are overthrown at hazard of their limbs." In the 1820s English football separated as two sports, rugby and soccer. The 1874 Harvard football team hosted a team from Montreal, Canada, and played half as Harvard's soccer and half as Montreal's rugby. By 1900 football was well established close to its present form but players had no padding or helmets, and injuries often occurred. This caused President Teddy Roosevelt to push for rules making football safer.

Some things change … some things don't.

G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist.