"Trimming your
nails sucks, and it's not your digits' fault. Technology is to blame. Nail
clippers. Blech. With a one size fits all design, it's impossible to get your
whole nail in one clip. And curling over the bathroom bin doesn't make us any
more likely to keep the floor clean of our cast offs.
And yet, for more
than a century, we've been keeping our nails under control using the same
little imperfect machine.
How is it that this crummy design won us over?
The device started
wriggling its way into our hands and hearts in the late 19th century. Early
clippers looked like fat tweezers and worked when you squeezed them. Well that
sounds convenient! Inventors started improving: in a patent from 1881, the
mechanical nail-biter gets a lever to add vim to your trim. Fancy! This same
device also worked as a glove-buttoner and was designed to be dangled from a
belt or watch chain as if clipping your nails was something that didn't gross
out other people.
But the nail
clippers didn't go gangbusters at the time. Part of the reason was that
manufacturing them was expensive. So production never really got far off the
ground.
The nail
clipper's heyday really came in the 1940s when William E. Bassett of
Connecticut made the apparatus cheaper and a bit easier to use. Improved
manufacturing techniques, gleaned from when his company was making artillery
components for the Army, allowed Bassett to produce a clipper on the cheap. And
some tiny design tweaks make it easier on the user. Those two little nubs that
keep the arm from swinging out of place while folded? That was a Bassett
addition. He also gave the lever a little ripple designed to better catch the
thumb. People picked up that design and haven't put it down since.
Today they're so cheap
they're almost disposable. Bassett's TRIM clippers—or some other nearly
identical model—will set you back only about a buck or two. Perhaps our
problems with nail clippers pass with the action, or perhaps they're so cheap
that we don't feel like we have the right to complain. Whatever it is, the nail
clipper could still stand to do a better job.
Maniera più comune di tagliarsi le unghie.
In questo modo, le unghie vano in giro per tutta la stanza
Instead of
spraying shards of cast off nail, they should trap the shrapnel, or deposit it
neatly somewhere. According to Andrew Johnston, the owner of Klhip, a company
that recently reimagined nail clipper, the key to proper cutting is sharpness.
The cutting edge of the traditional model "crushes and snaps" the
nail. He likens the process to chopping carrots. "If you apply pressure
with a dull blade, the carrot goes flying," says Johnston. "But if
you have a sharp knife, the carrot slices either stick to the knife or fall on
the cutting board." Storing the average clipper next to the sink or at the
bottom of a makeup bag will cause its blade to quickly dull.
The clipper's
thin profile also contributes to its unenthusiastic chopping technique. The
reason is that the slim parts—designed so that the clipper is not a burden to
carry around—have a lot of give, so the jaws don't meet with quite as much
oomph as if the parts were more rigid.
Johnston has
solved this problem by making his nail clipper out of injection-molded
stainless steel that's been heat treated to make it extra hard. The blade on
his clipper stays sharper for longer and it doesn't have nearly as much bend.
But in order to get better performance, you're going to have to shell out $50.
Sure, Johnston's model is a better ergonomic design, with the arm connection
kicked to the back and extending forward, but the price point is too high for
most of us to even consider.
What we really need is the 2012 version of a Bassett
moment—give us all the nail-cutting good stuff, but at a price that will work
for the masses.”"
