Many of the most common things that we encounter in everyday life are also among the most elegant solutions in fitting form to function. Thus the familiar paper clip has long been widely admired by architects and designers for being a graceful loop-within-a-loop spring that silently does its job. The sewing needle, with its sharp, elongated point balanced by its soft oval eye, is a classic example of yin and yang united in a manufactured product. But such things, being made of steel, are many times removed from the mineral ore from which they begin. These are not things easily made from scratch by a single person. Small things made of wood are more organic, closer to nature and formable by an individual with little more than a sharp knife and a patient hand.rnMy vote for the simplest object of all goes to one that is made of a single material, has a single part and is intended (at least originally) for a single purpose, from which it gets its name: the toothpick. This humble tool, so familiar as to be generally unremarkable, can be made by an idle boy with a stick and a jackknife. Each example would bear the individuality of the whittler and the uniqueness of its circumstances. But in the latter part of the 19th century, toothpick making—like virtually everything else—began to be mechanized, producing a product whose shape could be reliably replicated.
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