A Place for the Point

In 1921, Anna McGuffey Morrill wrote down a childhood memory of watching a nurse dress her baby brother in Cincinnati. A flannel band went round his abdomen, followed by a fine shirt, more flannel and a muslin gown. The undergarments, including his nappy, were held with long ordinary pins. The nurse had to weave them through the cloth so their points stayed away from his skin.

Morrill’s account, published by her daughter in 1933, recalls a household practice rather than dating the arrival of a new invention. But it puts a useful task in view. After a point had pierced the layers, someone still had to decide where to leave it.

Walter Hunt’s answer joined that task to the fastening itself. His United States patent of 10 April 1849 described a dress pin whose pointed leg, spring and catch were all formed from one continuous piece of wire or metal. The point could enter the fabric, then take shelter in a catch which the pin’s own spring helped it stay inside.

The wire does the work

Hunt labelled the pointed part A and the coiled spring B. From the spring, another length of wire ran back alongside the point as bar C. At its far end, the wire turned into catch D. Following the letters takes the reader around a complete working object without crossing a hinge.

When released from the catch, the pointed leg sprang open. Closing it meant bending that leg against the spring and moving its tip into the retaining curve. The spring then pressed the point against the catch. An elastic force that could throw the pin open could also keep it fastened, once the point was on the right side of the obstruction.

The drawing was already more varied than a single familiar silhouette. One version had an elliptical coil; another used a flat spiral. Decorations could be attached to the back bar. Hunt allowed ordinary pin wire or precious metal and envisaged ornamental dress, everyday clothing, nursery work and hairpins. A useful fastening could carry jewellery without changing its essential operation.

Eliminating the hinge mattered to him. A hinged clasp had a joint which might break, or a pivot which could wear and loosen. Hunt proposed making the material bend instead. His claim specifically excluded joints, hinges and additional metal, except for ornament.

That last condition separates the patent from many safety pins in a modern sewing box. The photographed example has a folded metal cap attached to the wire. Its spring and protected point make the relationship easy to recognise, but it is not a literal example of Hunt’s all-in-one construction.

An afternoon remembered

Hunt worked across a crowded range of practical problems.

His inventions included a flax- and hemp-spinning machine, a coach alarm, a knife sharpener and a bottle stopper. He also worked on an early sewing machine. By the time he patented the dress pin, he had spent years turning mechanical ideas into objects and patent applications.

His draftsman John R. Chapin recalled a particularly quick result. In an 1895 letter, reproduced in The New Yorker in 1946, Chapin remembered Hunt owing him $15, making a shielded pin from roughly eight inches of brass wire, selling the right for $400 and returning that afternoon to settle the debt. The recollection came forty-six years later. It names no buyer and supplies no exact three-hour interval.

The patent establishes a different part of the transaction. At its head, Hunt appears as assignor to William and John Richardson. At its foot, John M. Knox and Chapin appear as witnesses. Chapin belonged to the inventor’s working circle, but the document does not record a price or tell us who paid the $400 he remembered.

The stock from which the pin could be made was already an industrial product. In 1776, Adam Smith had used ordinary pin-making to explain the division of labour: drawing wire, straightening it, cutting, pointing, making and fitting heads, finishing and putting the pins into paper. A small article passed through numerous operations. Hunt’s patent specified a new arrangement of that familiar material, rather than a new way of producing wire.

Making the parts act as one did not make the forming work disappear. The point needed sharpening; the bends had to bring it into alignment with a catch which could retain it. Later manufacturing could repeat the work with machinery and add a protective cap from another piece of metal.

A closer look · 0:30 · Visual demonstration

A machine at work

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Earlier places for a sharp end

Metalworkers had been finding places for pin points for thousands of years. Ancient fibulae were clothing fasteners, often combining a springing pin with a catch. The Greek bronze example here, made in the late eighth or seventh century BCE, gave its catch plate an incised bird. Protection and display could occupy the same part of a garment fastening long before Hunt’s ornamental drawings.

There were even ancient continuous-wire solutions. An Italic spectacle fibula in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection winds one bronze wire into two large spirals, with its ends becoming the pin and catch. Hunt’s one-piece claim describes his particular construction; it cannot stand for the invention of every sprung or guarded pin. Nor does resemblance establish that he copied an ancient specimen.

Much closer to his own time, Thomas Woodward of Brooklyn patented a shielded shawl and nappy pin in 1842. One reached Dubuque, Iowa. Archaeologists examining the city’s Third Street Cemetery recorded a copper-alloy pin bearing the words “Woodward Patent”, found at the pelvis of an infant burial. It was a surviving product, not merely a predecessor’s drawing. The report distinguishes it from Hunt’s later design by the absence of his end spring.

The earlier fasteners make Hunt’s own priorities easier to understand. He concentrated the working parts in one piece and removed a separate pivot. He also addressed the fingers doing the fastening, promising convenience in inserting the pin without bending it or wounding the user. The point still had to be sharp enough to pass through clothing. Its protection came afterwards.

A catch can need a lock

Later inventors kept working on what could happen after a pin was closed. Walter W. Green’s 1958 patent addressed unintended opening, including opening by a child or by someone applying pressure without understanding its effect.

Green combined spring wire with a separate sheet-metal socket and added another hook. The pointed leg entered its socket, while the hook engaged the leg farther along. His description gave deliberate ways to release it: press and deflect the wire to disengage the hook, or ease the point from the socket and work the leg around the locking lever. Closing the ordinary catch was only the first fastening; the second had to be undone as well.