This Humble Little Toothpick

We are surrounded by things, things that make life easier, more decorative, sometimes even things without which our lives would be pretty unbearable.  Autos make life easier; beautiful materials on drapes and bedspreads add color and warmth; living day to day without indoor toilets is pretty much unimaginable to those of us who are younger than ninety.

I sometimes think about all these things in my life-who invented them, designed them, built them, all these things we take for granted?

As I was engaging in my daily dental floss and toothpicking routine, I gazed at my little white round toothpick.  I could see variations in the color of the wood and I got to thinking about how this little toothpick, one of two hundred fifty in a little box that can be bought for $1.00 (give or take a few cents),  came to be.  What kind of tree gave up its body, its leaves and its

view of the sky so that I could clean my teeth with its remains?

Turning to the trusty internet, I found excerpts from a 2007 book "The Toothpick", by Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, who chronicles the history of this little item and in this process, shows the reader how the history of the toothpick is a paradigm of American manufacturing from idea to invention, mass production, marketing, and ultimately, success and failure in a global economy.

Archaeologists analyzing the skulls of Neanderthal man found grooves in their teeth and concluded that once man started eating meat, he needed something to get those annoying shreds out from between his teeth and chewed sticks, bone, ivory, shells, bird claws or walrus whiskers to remove them.  Graves in Italy and Switzerland were found with bronze tooth cleaning devices.  By the 17th Century, toothpicks were a luxury item, made from precious metals and set with gems.  While the wealthy used these exotic toothpicks, the common man generally whittled a stick to care for his dental needs.

But one Charles Forster, a New England chap who worked in his uncle's import-export business in Brazil, noticed that the natives had beautiful teeth and attributed them to their use of handcarved toothpicks.  Mr. Forster decided he could mass produce toothpicks and make a fortune.  He went back to New England, bought the rights to an invention that was capable of mass producing them and by 1870, he was churning out millions of toothpicks in one day.  (One log can produce one million toothpicks.)

But nobody was buying his toothpicks, as sticks were still readily available to be whittled.  So Mr. Forster went to Boston, hired Harvard students to dine at elite restaurants and had them demand wooden toothpicks at the end of their meals.  If none were available, the diners threatened not to return.  Restaurateurs had to comply with customer demands and started buying Mr. Forster's toothpicks when he visited the restaurants to sell them the next day. The rest, as they say, is history.

The uses for toothpicks have evolved.  The humble wooden toothpick still cleans our teeth.  But we have fancy plastic toothpicks with which to stab hors d'oeuvres,  wooden toothpicks with little papers hats on top to keep sandwiches together and hold olives in martinis and toothpicks are used to test baked goods for perfection before removing them from the oven.  

Alas, there is only one toothpick factory, Diamond, left in the United States.  American toothpicks are made of cleaned white birch but today, the cost of manufacturing them in the U.S. almost exceeds the sales price so the other brands we see are made in China and Southeast Asia of trees not as sturdy or white as the birch tree.

They say you can see the whole world in a grain of sand or maybe, in this case, in the humble toothpick.