The Cork Turns First

Samuel Henshall offered Matthew Boulton an invention whose simplicity, he thought, would surprise everyone who saw it. A clergyman and scholar of early English, Henshall had applied himself to the much more immediate difficulty of opening a bottle. His improvement, he told the Birmingham manufacturer, would extract even the hardest or most decayed cork.

The letter, quoted by Manchester Grammar School’s archive, makes a large promise for a small addition. Henshall put a button between the corkscrew’s shaft and its spiral. It changed what the tool did at the moment when an ordinary corkscrew had finished its first job and left the next one to the user’s strength.

Two movements

A corkscrew has to get a grip before it can extract anything. On a simple T-shaped tool, the user turns the cross-handle while the pointed spiral, traditionally called the worm, enters the cork. The stopper stays in the bottle neck; the worm travels into it. When enough metal has entered to hold, the user stops turning and pulls upwards.

The cork resists for a reason closely related to the one that made it useful as a stopper. It can be squeezed into a narrow opening and then recover against its surroundings. Inside a bottle, that recovery presses it against the glass. Friction at the contact helps oppose the upward pull. A sound, tightly seated cork may be difficult to start; a weakened one may tear before it comes free.

The handle gives the hand room to twist and pull. The worm anchors the tool in the stopper. In this direct-pull arrangement, neither part gives the hand a separate support against which to lever the cork out.

Henshall inserted another action between turning the worm and pulling the handle. His button sat immediately above the worm, with a concave underside to bear on the top of the cork. Once the worm had gone far enough, the button reached the stopper and prevented the screw from advancing farther into it. Continued turning then made the cork rotate inside the neck.

The purpose was to break the cork loose before attempting the upward pull. The worm had first moved relative to the cork; now the worm and button made the cork move relative to the bottle. The serrations on the later museum example give the underside an additional grip. Its small brush served a different preparation, clearing dust and wax debris from the bottle neck.

This familiar Henshall form still left the lifting to the person holding it. There was no long lever bearing on the bottle rim. The improvement concerned how extraction began, and it also limited how far the worm could be screwed into the stopper. Henshall’s claim about the most decayed cork was a sales promise, rather than a guarantee that damaged material would hold together.

A specification at Soho

Boulton manufactured the corkscrews at Soho, in Birmingham. Henshall had studied at Oxford and written about Anglo-Saxon. He served as curate at Spitalfields and later as rector at Bow in east London.

The paperwork has stayed with the manufacturer’s papers. Henshall’s letters patent, granted on 24 August 1795, survive in the Boulton archive at the Library of Birmingham. The specification is dated a month later, 24 September. Another item from 1795 names the product as Boulton & Co.’s “Spiralytic Cork Screw”, invented by Samuel Henshall.

This was the first British corkscrew patent, not the invention of the corkscrew itself. Nor did the drawing confine the idea to the familiar wooden-handled tool: the reproduced patent plate includes a more elaborate framed arrangement as well as the direct-pull form. A patent could contain alternatives which a surviving household example does not show.

The button also offered a surface for the maker’s mark. An example catalogued by Christie’s has a ring-turned wooden handle, a baluster-shaped shaft and a concave button marked “Obstando Promoves Soho Patent”. Its inscription joins the invention to the place of manufacture. The later tool illustrated here belongs to the Henshall type; it is not an attributed original from Boulton’s shop.

According to the school archive’s account, Boulton struggled to obtain Henshall’s share of the patent expenses. His legal adviser compared extracting £50 from the parson with extracting a cork. The money, he thought, would be harder to get out.

Borrowing support from the bottle

Later designers could address the work Henshall’s direct-pull tool still left to the arm. Carl Friedrich Albert Wienke’s lever corkscrew, protected in Germany in 1882 and patented in the United States on 21 August 1883, brought the bottle into the mechanism.

Its worm and a separate folding arm were pivoted to the handle. The user screwed the worm into the cork, then rested the arm on the bottle rim. That contact became the support for a lever. Raising the far end of the handle lifted the worm and its captive stopper, while the arm pressed down against the glass.

Wienke’s specification follows the hands through the operation. The left hand holds the bottle neck and its index finger keeps the supporting arm seated on the rim; the right hand lifts the handle. The drawing includes a small cutting blade and shows the parts folded together for carrying. This was a compact arrangement which could be opened out into a longer working tool.

The bottle now carried part of the load. Henshall’s button had made the cork turn before the hand pulled it; Wienke’s support gave the hand somewhere to bear while making the lift. When the job was done, the worm and supporting arm folded back into the handle.