Toothpick Technology and Culture

Prologue The plain wooden toothpick, it may be argued, is among the simplest of manufactured things. It consists of a single part, made of a single material, intended for a single purposefrom which it gets its simple name. It is also among the most convenient and ready of things. It can be used directly out of the boxthere being no instructions to read, no parts to assemble, no priming or booting required, and no maintenance expected. When it has served its purpose, it is simply discarded. Such simplicity of design and use might lead one to expect an equally simple and straightforward history, one easily researched and explicated by a student doing a term paper. In the twenty-first century, such a student would very likely navigate around the World Wide Web via Google or some other digital search engine and come up with enough snippets to stitch together a plausible storyas long as the sources were unquestioned, the gaps glossed over, and the contradictions ignored. Of the quotations rustled up from the Web and corralled at the beginning of this book, every one but the statement about generating power from wood waste is at best a half-truth. In fact, the full and true story of something even so simple as the toothpick cannot easily be gleaned from the Internet alone. Unfortunately, more traditional sources of information and scholarship, such as manuscripts, articles, books, and other written materials in archives and analog libraries, also often provide sparse, erroneous, and contradictory information for topics considered too banal for and thus neglected by scholars seeking to pursue grander things and themes. The very simplicity and banality of the thing made the toothpick and its manufacture an artifact of tacit knowledge and trade secrets. Even in the late twentieth century, Japanese visitors who showed up at a Maine toothpick factory were turned away, lest they see the tricks of the trade. An American scholar, who should hardly have been seen as a potential competitor, was similarly denied entrance to a Minnesota counterpart. He had to go to Sweden to see some toothpicks being made. Secrecy coupled with a dearth of reliable, confirmable documentary material makes the task of uncovering the real story of a common object a challenge for ordinary scholarship relying on the usual scholarly sources. But there are other sources of information, not least of which is the artifact itself and the documented social and cultural context in which it has been made and used. Much of the story of the toothpick must be coaxed out of the thing itself and its milieu. With patience, slivers of it can be teased out of even a closed box of toothpicks the way a stubborn seed eventually can be dislodged from between the teeth. Insights into the use and misuse of things can be gleaned from both the froth and the detritus of society. Whatever its history, the toothpick-manufacturing process has become so automated and efficient that no human hand touches the product until it is taken up to be used. An antiseptic toothpick costs but a fraction of a fraction of a cent, and it can be tossed away after a single use. Since it is made of untreated wood, the biodegradable toothpick presents no substantial danger to the environment. At first glance, it seems not easily implicated in global warminguntil we remember that trees have been sacrificed for and energy consumed in its production. But as neglected, small, insignificant, and inconsequential as the artifact might seem to be, the story of the toothpick holds great potential for revealing often hidden and frequently overlooked relationships among the people and things of the world. As Archimedes asserted that, if he were given a long enough lever and a place on which to stand, he could move the earth, so we can imagine that, given a toothpick and a sense of its place in history, we can nudge our understPetroski, Henry is the author of 'Toothpick Technology and Culture', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307266361 and ISBN 0307266362.