Ingenious device

     

     The tendency is to throw stuff away. So when I noticed a two-inch tear in the fabric a the collar of a blue pajama top, my first impulse was just to rip it open, for good measure, and toss it away. I have plenty of pairs of J. Crew pajamas, this one is quite worn, obviously. Move forward.
     However. I could also, I realized, sew it. Closing the rend, well, the top could last for ... quite a bit longer. I went to my wife's sewing box, removed one of those little sewing kits you get at hotels. There was a needle and white thread. The needle was very small and I had difficulty threading it. One, two, three, four tries.
     The needle was cheap and very small. I thought I might have a better one in my desk, so pulled open the center drawer. There was a second kit, including a device I had never noticed before, nor realized existed. A diamond-shaped wire attacked to a small round metal tab depicting the profile of a woman's face. It was obvious what this thing did — you push the wire through the needle's eye, hook the thread and pull it back.
   Worked like a charm. I switched over the rend twice, to make sure it was securely sewn. When I finished I looked at the clock. It had taken exactly 10 minutes. A men's pajama set on J. Crew is $94. Say the top is half that, $47. Factor in depreciation, let's say the value left in the top I saved by repairing it is $15. 
    Meaning, doing the math, that I earned more benefit repairing an old pajama top than I earn writing a column for the Sun-Times, because there are 60 minutes in an hour, and six times $15 is $90 — the newspaper does not pay me $90 an hour.
     A lot of guys would never sew a rip — I wonder if they might now that they know how profitable it can be.
     Leaving me with only two questions: first, who's the lady? Prof. Google has no idea, guessing Arachne or Minerva, Greek gods skilled in needlework. 
     The second question was: who invented it? Searching patent records, the closest I found was the above, from 1859. If you look hard, it's not the same — a sort of tiny tongs, to pull the thread through, as opposed to a diamond shape wire, which is thinner, easier and cheaper to construct. I imagine it's there, in the records, as a later development, but don't feel particularly inclined to search it out.

    As a rule, I assume that if I don't know about something, nobody knows. Though my wife knew of the threaders, imagining that it was probably a woman who invented the first one. Though admitting that, back in the day, many tailors were men, so a man could have developed the ingenious device as well. I thought, with intelligence hit upon hard times, any evidence of human cleverness worthy of mention.