The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.
It’s so natural to want to take a whack at the fly buzzing around your head, it’s hard to think of fly swatters as something somebody actually invented. But someone did.
WEAPON OF MESHED DESTRUCTION
On January 9, 1900, the U.S. Patent Office granted patent number 640,790 to Robert R. Montgomery of Decatur, Illinois, illustrated with a detailed drawing of a piece of window screen, folded precisely at one end and attached to a wooden handle with two rivets. The design turned out to be so perfect that it has remained essentially unchanged for more than a century, even down to the helpful hole (also shown on the patent application) on the end of the handle for hanging on a nail.
Today, the occasional fly that gets into the house is an annoyance, but not much more. It’s difficult to imagine how serious a health hazard flies were before modern medicines and pesticides, when horses were used for transportation, outhouses used for bathrooms, fresh manure used as fertilizer, and open windows used as “air conditioning.” Animal dung was everywhere— not only on the farm, but also in big cities, where the streets were literally paved with layer upon layer of horse droppings. Populations of house flies would explode each year. But flies do not live by poop alone, and at a time when open windows and doors were the only way to cope with sweltering summers, flies came from the street (and outhouse) into the home with impunity, landing on food, sleeping babies, pets, and anything else that would stand still. And they weren’t just unappetizing houseguests— although they do not bite, houseflies are carriers of dozens of diseases, including typhoid, cholera, dysentery, anthrax, tuberculosis, and salmonella.
INVENTED ON THE FLY
People had long been whacking at flies with rolled-up newspapers or whatever else was at hand, but nothing had ever accomplished the task with the elegant efficiency of Robert Montgomery’s fly swatter. Besides stealth, speed, and accuracy, Montgomery’s meshed screen brought forward enough bulk to kill the fly without damaging what was beneath it. The flexible “whiplike” killing surface worked on irregular and angular surfaces, and the mesh allowed a large enough surface area to thwart last-second fly evasions without creating wind resistance. And best of all, the thin, sharp edges of the swat surface tended to slice into the fly’s body instead of smashing it flat, minimizing the mess on walls, furniture, paintings, wallpaper, and unlucky bystanders.
PEST ASIDES
Montgomery may have been a genius in fly-killing technology, but he wasn’t really that interested in manufacturing the swatter. Three years after his patent was granted, with the public buying up half a million fly swatters a year, Montgomery and his overworked partners (his two sons) decided it was time to turn the invention over to somebody else. That somebody was a local manufacturer named John L. Bennett. Bennett would later take credit for making “dramatic improvements” to the fly swatter, but his contribution was literally “tinkering around the edges.” He added stitching around the outside of the netting to keep it from fraying. (He’d later have a more legitimate claim to pop-culture fame as the man who patented the beer can.)
KILLER APP
There have been many attempts to improve on fly-swatting technology, from fly guns that shoot swatting disks to electrified fly zappers, but the most popular anti-fly weapon remains the classic fly swatter, unchanged in basic design (except that they’re now made of plastic instead of wood and metal). They’re inexpensive, well-suited for the job intended, and still weirdly satisfying when you make solid contact. Who but the flies could ask for anything more?
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader. The 26th annual edition of Uncle John’s wildly successful series is all-new and jam-packed with the BRI’s patented mix of fun and information.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!