In 2014, a century-old handmade scissors manufacturer named Ernest Wright & Sons was in dire straits. Business was so slow at the Sheffield, England shop that its craftsmen were only working two days a week. And then the internet came to the rescue.
Thanks to a viral short film depicting one of its master craftsmen at work, Ernest Wright & Sons became a phenomenon. After launching a Kickstarter campaign, the company received two years' worth of orders in a single day. By last year it was again struggling again with overwhelming demand and debt, when a pair of Dutch entrepreneurs swooped in to make another rescue.
Even in our paperless era, craft scissor-makers straight out of history persist and even thrive. Ernest Wright wasn't the only Sheffield scissor company to get a batch of cash from Kickstarter recently: The even older William Whiteley company brought in 65% more than its goal in 2017 for a line of scissors that starts at $133. That company turns 259 this year, and China's oldest scissor manufacturer dates back an additional century; while the Finnish company Fiskars, which makes the familiar orange-handled variety, was founded 370 years ago.
Let's cut to the chase.
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 ScissorsFebruary 05, 2019 |
Sharp objects
In 2014, a century-old handmade scissors manufacturer named Ernest Wright & Sons was in dire straits. Business was so slow at the Sheffield, England shop that its craftsmen were only working two days a week. And then the internet came to the rescue.
Thanks to a viral short film depicting one of its master craftsmen at work, Ernest Wright & Sons became a phenomenon. After launching a Kickstarter campaign, the company received two years' worth of orders in a single day. By last year it was again struggling again with overwhelming demand and debt, when a pair of Dutch entrepreneurs swooped in to make another rescue.
Even in our paperless era, craft scissor-makers straight out of history persist and even thrive. Ernest Wright wasn't the only Sheffield scissor company to get a batch of cash from Kickstarter recently: The even older William Whiteley company brought in 65% more than its goal in 2017 for a line of scissors that starts at $133. That company turns 259 this year, and China's oldest scissor manufacturer dates back an additional century; while the Finnish company Fiskars, which makes the familiar orange-handled variety, was founded 370 years ago.
Let's cut to the chase.
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A person who makes handmade scissors is called a putter. The term is short for a putter-togetherer of scissors.
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ACCENTURE - Explore key insights—backed by extensive research and subject matter expertise—to discover how you can harness disruption to drive new value for your organization.176: Steps in the process of making handmade scissors
11: Generations the William Whiteley scissor company has been in the same family
5,000-8,000: Cuts that make up a "lifetime" of scissor use, as benchmarked by Fiskars
2,084: Scissors used in Shigeo Fukuda's shadow-art sculpture of a ship
0°: Angle of the blade on children's safety scissors
5°-15°: Angle of the blade on typical paper scissors
45°: Angle of the blade on dressmaking scissors
The accidental orange icon
Chances are, you've used or owned a pair of scissors with an orange plastic handle manufactured by the Fiskars Corporation. Since hitting the market in 1967, more than 1 billion pairs have been sold. In fact, they're reportedly the only orange-handled scissors allowed to be sold in the US.
The brainchild of Fiskars designer Olaf Bäckström, the scissors were an attempt to make a pair of lighter-weight shears. At the time, Fiskars was busy trying to produce a new line of orange juicers—which were, naturally, made from orange plastic—and Bäckström crafted his prototype out of the excess material sitting around. An office style icon was born.
1500 BCE: The first pair of bronze spring-action scissors are made in Mesopotamia, probably to snip cloth.
1st to 4th century: Pivot-scissors (considered "modern scissors") are independently invented in Rome and China.
1500s: In an attempt to standardize English spellings, publishers add a pesky "sc" to the beginning of the word scissors (which was formerly spelled sissors or sizars). The decision is a nod to the Latin word scindere, meaning "to snip." There's just one problem: The etymology is all wrong.
1663: Using old sword-making tricks, China's Hangzhou Zhang Xiaoquan Company begins manufacturing unprecedentedly sharp scissors. The 355-year-old corporation still makes them today.
1761: England's Robert Hinchliffe kickstarts history's first mass-produced line of pivot-scissors.
1845: German fables introduce children to Shock-headed Peter, a boy who refuses to use scissors and ends up looking like this. (Not content with giving children one scissors-related nightmare, German writers also introduce us to the "great tall tailor," a man who ambushes thumb-sucking children and cuts off their fingers with a pair of oversized clippers.)
1990: Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands introduces children to a more gentle and shrub-loving nightmare.
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These scissors of Sheffield steel
It's not a coincidence that internet craftsmanship-seekers landed on two Sheffield-based scissor companies. In an industry that carries deep roots, it's one of the places they run deepest, as references from Chaucer to the Clash indicate. For that one man is largely responsible, Benjamin Huntsman, a clockmaker who changed the world by attempting to improve the steel for his clock parts. In 1740, Huntsman borrowed the use of clay crucibles from glassmakers, which permitted extremely high temperatures, and moved to Sheffield because it was a good source of coke, which he needed to achieve such a hot fire. Huntsman steel was so hard that Sheffield cutlers at first refused to use it; only when French cutlery made with Huntsman steel started threatening their business did they adapt.
About two decades after Huntsman's innovation, the first pivot scissors for the masses started rolling out of the city. (Sheffield was also the site of the next great cutlery disruption, the invention of stainless steel in 1914.) As late as the 1970s the city could boast "no less than 150 small scissor-making companies," according to the BBC, but now it's down to two that are hoping there's still a market for special shears.
Pop Quiz What's the difference between scissors and shears? |
One of the most difficult forms of dance in the world is the UNESCO-listed scissors dance of the Quechua people of Peru, which combines the intensity of ballet training with the competition of breakdancing. Events can run 10 hours while dancers wear 33-pound suits (and wield scissors, obviously).
Shear brilliance
Scissors are responsible for art far beyond the kindergarten classroom. Near the end of his life—divorced, ill, confined to a wheelchair, having just lived through a French war zone at the end of World War II—Henri Matisse began "drawing with scissors," creating vibrant collages in such a frenzy that his eyes gave out because, an optician said, "his retina could not keep up with the pace at which his brain processed color." More recently, Kara Walker and William Kentridge brought new angles to the art of the silhouette.
They're also the basis of some spectacular folk art in the form of Scherenschnitte, German for "scissor cuts," like this work of weeping-willow trees meant to mourn the death of a Union soldier. And, of course, valentines. In 2015, the National Museum Zurich hosted a Scherenschnitte exhibit to show its evolution.
"If certain implements, such as knives and swords, axes and tongs, bear witness to the development of masculine taste and inventiveness while rarely attaining the status of works of art, scissors, on the contrary, are a more delicate testimony to the development of feminine taste and also to the attention paid to the style and sensitivity of the fairer sex by men. Indeed, a potential suitor sending a "love-box" to a lady of rank in the 14th century would be sure to include a pair of scissors in a leather sheath, an accessory of Muslim origin."
—Massimiliano Mandel, Scissors
"A murder without gleaming scissors is like asparagus without the hollandaise sauce—tasteless."
Poll Rock, paper, scissors, shoot... |
In Friday's poll about knots, 35% of you said you know "a handful of useful ones," followed by 31% who know "enough to tie my shoes."
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Today's email was written by Lucas Reilly, edited by Whet Moser, and produced by Luiz Romero.
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