Safety Pins

Uses of the Safety Pin

      I love safety pins! They’re shiny, they’re safe, and they hold things together like a charm. After a hard night’s battling concert crowds and really wild dancers, your clothes can get ripped and torn, particularly if you got them second-secondhand. No problem! A few carefully placed safety pins can fix it instantly so your dress doesn’t fall off before you get a chance to sew it up. And they look cool! Especially when you put them through your ear. Then people think maybe you just pushed a pin through your ear one day, and no one has to know you got them pierced at Claire’s.
      Safety pins also make awesome chains. We all know chains are cool, and a lot of people have them for their wallets or whatever. There are many designs available. But consider for a moment the safety pin chain. It’s cheaper and lighter than your average chain, and adjustable to nearly any length, provided you have an infinite number of safety pins (and chances are, you do). It’s also multi-useful. I can’t count the number of times someone has run up to me in the hallways and panted, "Rachel, do you still have all those safety pins? It’s an emergency!" I’m very generous with lending out pins from my chain, even though I hardly ever get them back, because you know what? They’re cheap!
      I only wish I had a GIANT safety pin. *sigh*...

A Brief History of the Safety Pin

      The modern safety pin was patented in 1849 by Walter Hunt, a guy from New York. (He also invented a sewing machine, but he didn’t get a patent for it because he thought it would put poor seamstresses out of work. What a big man.) Anyway, bronze and gold safety pins were used by ancient peoples. In ancient Greece, a fibula, a brooch resembling the safety pin, was a popular piece of jewelry.

Sources: The ‘P’ Volume of the 1961 World Book Encyclopedia; the 1995 Grolier’s Encyclopedia; the 2000 Encarta Encyclopedia (not a ton of help, but I did play me a mean game of Mind Maze!!). Three sources, enough for a school report, and that’s all the information I got! I wonder how I filled a page in my fourth grade report on the safety pin. I think I talked about pin money, small amounts of money women got for sewing, and how pins were so rare in 1100s England that they were only sold on January 1st and 2nd. But that really has nothing to do with safety pins, that’s more pins in general, I think.

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