Manson's Memo - safety pins and sewing machines

Do you know who invented the safety pin? That was Walter Hunt (1796-1859). He was a mechanic who was a prolific inventor. He also invented the fountain pen, a knife sharpener, road sweeping machinery, a flax spinner and loads of others.

One of his inventions was a sewing machine. We usually recognize Elias Howe as inventing the sewing machine. But that was twenty years after Hunt invented his. The difference is that Hunt didn’t patent his sewing machine. No doubt it could have made him a lot of money, but he worried that if he patented it and started producing it, it would put seamstresses out of work.

That sounds amazingly quaint from our Twenty-first Century point of view. Now machines do more and more work, which allow corporations to downsize and outsource their workforces. Nobody seems much to care if a new invention will eliminate jobs as Hunt cared about the seamstresses. In fact, in the business world the more jobs you can eliminate, the better for the bottom line.

Lest we think we can blame all of this on soulless corporation and their overpaid management, we need to remember that we want to pay as little as possible for all the things we want. We don’t want to pay for the kind of quality that a seamstress would put into her creations. As shareholders (and nearly all of us are in some way) we want the corporations to make money that will filter down to us.

In an age of growing industrialization, Walter Hunt was different than many of the inventors and entrepreneurs who were making their fortunes. He chose not to do it at someone else’s expense.

Everyday we do many things that affect people around us. It would be nice if we learned to think about the effects our actions and decisions have on others as well as ourselves. Maybe Walter Hunt doesn’t fit the Twenty-first Century business paradigm, but I do think he understood what Jesus meant when he said, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.�

שלןמ

(shalom)