It didn’t happen this year at Harry’s, one of my favorite Wall Street watering holes, but I did celebrate April 10th with a trip to the neighborhood tavern. I drank first to my friend Art Cashin from UBS Financial Services Inc and to clever guys sitting at bars giving away million-dollar ideas and then to a fellow New Yorker named Walter Hunt.
You see in 1849, the U.S. Government issued patent #6281, for a very remarkable and stunningly successful product. The product was so simple yet useful that most people think it’s been around for centuries. This product sold ten times as many items as every telephone or radio ever made. The product I refer to was the safety pin!
What I love the most about this invention is that it was invented in a bar. You see, on that day, a saloon customer complained of having to fasten things easily without cutting a finger or harming the person wearing what you were fastening. After a couple of rounds, a guy named Walter Hunt discoursed that the solution was easy and called for a piece of string steel, to the left of the olives and two shelves down from the boiled eggs and he began to twiddle.
Prompted by buyers of a few rounds, he first resolved a loop at the end to give the gadget spring. But what helped was a spring with two pointed ends. Amidst hecklers and more drink buyers Hunt showed that by hammering one end with an available bartender’s muddle he could cap the sharp end. Thus, in less than three hours Walter Hunt had invented one of the most widely sold items in human history.
However as fate, bar politics, or a few rounds would have it, someone said, “Hunt, I’ll pay you $100 for the rights”. And Hunt said, “Done!” Thus, in three hours and ten minutes Hunt had conceived, invented and then sold the rights to one of the simplest yet most successful inventions in history.
Pass those peanuts, please.
Poet, Blogger, Radio Podcaster
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