Ingenious device

     

     The tendency is to throw stuff away. So when I noticed a two-inch tear in the fabric at the collar of a blue pajama top, my first impulse was just to rip it open furrther, for good measure, and turn it into rags. I have plenty of pairs of J. Crew pajamas; this one is well 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, its eye very small. I thought I might have a better needle in my desk, with a bigger, more threadable eye, 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, feed in the thread and pull it back.
   Worked like a charm. I stitched 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. Ballpark the top as half that, $47. Factor in depreciation, let's say the value left in the top I repaired is $15. 
    Meaning, doing the math, that I earned more sewing 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 sobering thought. Or a liberating one.  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. My brother, drawn into the question, put it to Chat GBT, which came up with an answer that sounds right:

     The woman depicted on this item is not a specific historical or famous figure; it is a generic classical or Greco-Roman-style profile, commonly used in the design of needle threaders like the one shown in your photo.
     This image is a traditional decorative motif, not meant to represent an identifiable individual. The design has been used for decades by various manufacturers, often inspired by classical art or a stylized “seamstress” figure.     

     The second question was: who invented this handy gizmo? 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. There were also indications it was cooked up in England a few decades earlier.

    As a rule, I assume that if I don't know about something, nobody knows. Though my wife knew about the threader, suggesting that its inventor was probably an unheralded woman. Though she admitted that, in the 19th century, many tailors were men, so a man could have developed the ingenious device as well. 

    Anyway, I thought, with intelligence hit upon hard times, almost any evidence of human cleverness is worthy of mention.