have caused many objects to change their appearance while retaining their original use. Most often, we only find these antique pieces through photographs or archive images on television or social networks. But when we can see them in real life and handle them, it’s like a part of history that presents itself to us. This is what happened with this Internet user who found wooden objects that we use every day, but in their original form.
Well-known wooden pins
Sometimes we use objects every day without knowing their “journey”, without knowing how they were made, or without wondering if they have always been as we see them every day. We have all at least once dried our laundry or seen the neighbors putting socks, shirts or other pants on a line in the sun. And to keep all these clothes from flying away in the wind, pins hold them. Originally, these pins were made of wood before being introduced to the market in plastic form for cost reasons. We are of course talking about clothespins , everyday objects, sold by the millions every year in all countries of the world.
But have they always had the shape we know today, or have they undergone a major evolution? A user got his hands on some old clothespins and asked his followers if they knew what he had found by sharing a photo. The Facebook post got a lot of reaction, and several people recognized the objects. “Old-fashioned clothespins. We used them to hang clean and wet clothes outside on the clothesline to dry in the sun and fresh air!” read one of the comments. Today, clothespins are made of two pieces of wood (or plastic) connected by a hinge at one end, with a spring mechanism to firmly grip the laundry against the line where the clothes are hung.
Objects dating back to Antiquity
In the photo of the internet user in question, we see small wooden dowels with two legs , with a more rounded shape and without the spring system that we know today. Now that we know what they are, we can easily make a connection with the clothespins that we use every day. But before the disclosure of the photo, it was much more difficult to know what these wooden objects were. The history of these clothespins dates back to Antiquity . They were made by hand and besides wood, they could also be made with bone or even stone .
The clothespin, still in use today, first appeared in the 19th century and was handcrafted from solid wood, often maple or birch. A patent was filed on October 25, 1853, by David M. Smith, a native of Vermont, USA. “The great advantage which my improved clothespin possesses over the common pin is, that it cannot be blown off the clothes by the wind, as is the case with the common pin, which is a serious inconvenience to washerwomen ,” Smith said at the time. With the industrialization that followed, factories manufacturing wooden clothespins were established to mass-produce large quantities of these small wooden objects that are still very useful to us today.
