The Inventor Extraordinaire Who Gave Us the Safety Pin: Walter Hunt

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Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. Walter Hunt is known as the Yankee mechanical genius. His hundreds of inventions include a saw, a steamer, inkstands, a nail-making machine, a rifle, a revolver, bullets, bicycles, a shirt collar, a boot heel, and a ceiling-walking circus device. Hunt’s most successful invention was designed in just three hours to settle a fifteen-dollar debt to one of the many draftsmen he tasked with drawing up his patents. Here is our frequent contributor, Ashley Lebinski, with the story. He’s the co-host of Discovery Channel’s Master of Arms, the former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and is the co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law’s Firearms Research Center. Here’s act.

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Speaker 2: It never ceases to amaze me how often prolific inventors are left on the cutting-room floor of history. And there’s another part of that, too, which, as you see in the nineteenth century, a lot of inventors who dabble in multiple different kinds of industries. And you see both of these things happening with one inventor in the eighteen forties, and so he’s the inventor of the safety pin and a successful lockstitch sewing machine, but he was also behind some of the most important developments in modern firearms technology. Walter Hunt was born in upstate New York in seventeen ninety-six, and by his twenty-first birthday, he actually earned advanced degrees in masonry and quickly could have moved on to a career of inventing, and this man kind of invented a little bit of everything. His initial inventions surrounded improvements in milling machinery, but he quickly turned to the eclectic for the rest of his career. The first major, major thing that he’s known for was his invention of a bell that was affixed to a carriage, so in response to a carriage accident — that actually, the carriage ran over a child — Walter Hunt developed this bell that could be operated by a carriage driver’s feet while safely maintaining hold of the horse’s reins, basically to send out a warning so people could hear when the carriage was coming so that they could get out of the way. He then went on to invent a fire engine, improvements in coal-burning stoves, a knife sharpener, artificial stone, rotary street sweepers, mail-sorting machinery. Like I said, very, very random: paraffin oil, candles, shirt collars, fountain pens, and other industrial machinery. In the mid-eighteen thirties, Hunt actually was a pioneer in terms of the modern sewing machine, although he didn’t initially pursue a patent because he didn’t want to hurt the careers of seamstresses. So the women in his life actually worked as seamstresses, and they were concerned because what he invented was so efficient, so successful, that they were worried that they wouldn’t have jobs if his invention was adopted en masse. And so he decided, “You know, I did this great thing, but I’m not going to take out a patent so that I don’t mess up a lot of careers of women in the nineteenth century.” By the eighteen forties, Hunt’s successful inventions became really pretty popular. I have a working theory that within one or two degrees of separation, you can connect something to firearms history in all of America. And part of that is because there was so, so much cross-contamination in inventions, so a lot of firearms designers made sewing machines during this timeframe. So, of course, Walter Hunt was going to make something with firearms, and his invention was not the most successful product. But what he ultimately did was he created the oldest direct ancestor to the Winchester Action rifle. In the eighteen forties, Walter Hunt developed a firearm which was aptly named the Hunt Volitional Repeating Rifle, and it was a gun that was patented to hold around twelve or so rounds of ammunition. He was not quite precise in the amount of ammo that could be held in a magazine on the firearm. At the same time, he also developed a form of semi-caseless ammunition that paired with his firearm. During this timeframe, repeating technology with firearms was incredibly common, and one of the most notable figures that we always talk about around the same time was Colt’s success with his revolver. But it wasn’t until multiple advanced technologies got married together in one type of firearm that the pathway towards mass manufacture of reliable repeating technology truly took off. To be completely honest, Hunt’s firearm was a total hot mess and was never produced en masse. In fact, the only known example is actually at the Cody Firearms Museum in Wyoming, which houses the entirety of the Winchester Arms Collection. But what was so significant was that several of his ideas came together to further firearms technology forever. And one of those things was the type of ammunition. So, historically speaking, ammunition was kind of loaded separately: so you had your powder, projectile, you know, all as individual components. But he patented a way for the powder, the primer, the projectile to all be kind of smashed together into one. Now, it wasn’t as successful as later ammunition, but it really was one of the first times you get it all pushed together. Another thing that he patented with the Hunt Volitional Repeating Rifle was a tubular magazine, so basically a tube that allows ammunition to be loaded, and then the firearm can fire multiple rounds in succession before having to reload. So you didn’t have to have a cylinder that was rotated; you didn’t have to have any type of external kind of component in order to load your firearm. You had a tube that was resting under the barrel, and then you had ammunition that was all complete that allowed for the gun to fire. One of the other things that the Hunt Volitional Repeater had was a firing system that was known as striker-fire, which basically uses a pin to strike the primer of a cartridge in order to fire the gun. And striker-fire is something that’s most often associated with modern firearms, but he’s got probably one of the earliest striker-fire guns in American and even international history. You see it sometimes with early bolt-action technology, but for the most part, this is something that is, you know, maybe a century ahead of its time. What’s kind of funny about the development of all of these different things into a gun that wasn’t successful but then ultimately inspired one of the most iconic guns in American history was that this small component, this needle-like pin that was used to fire the gun, also showed up in other parts of his work. So he created certain pins, you know, that had pointy tips. But the thing that he is most known for is the invention of the safety pin. Now, I don’t know if the striker-fire Hunt gun inspired the safety pin. Maybe I’m making a stretch there or vice versa, but this is something that he did around the same time that he was working on the Hunt Volitional Repeating Rifle in eighteen forty-nine. And what he was kind of coming up with here, I guess it goes along with his background in creating sewing machines, but he was trying to find a new way that you could attach clothing items together. And so what he did was he utilized a coil-wire design, and he added spring tension to it with a protective clasp to keep the pin and clothes secured. And if you think about that description, that kind of sounds exactly like a safety pin today. And that’s because the design was so inventive and effective back in the eighteen forties that it really hasn’t changed much since then. Hunt sold the patent for four hundred dollars to W. R. Grace and Company to pay off a draftsman he owed; so he had some debts, and so he saw this as a good opportunity to pay that off but not necessarily make a lot of money for himself. W. R. Grace would go on to make millions of dollars off of Hunt’s invention, and not unlike Oliver Winchester. I guess when you think about his firearm that he invented, but he himself would not see the financial fruits of his labors. This is kind of one of those sad stories that you hear a lot throughout invention history. You see a lot with designers. They come up with this great idea, but they’re kind of, you know, the genius mind, and then they always end up selling it to the business mind. I guess a lot of times, you’ve got the genius mind go up against the business mind, and who’s going to win in terms of finances? In that one, it’s probably going to be the business person. And so he did try to at some point kind of recoup some of his money by taking the patent out later on the sewing machine. But his legacy, at least for invention, certainly stood the test of time, and he’s actually in the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his invention of the safety pin. When you look at all the stuff he made, he probably could be in there for a lot of different reasons, but the fact that the safety pin is what got him into a Hall of Fame shows how the simplest invention can revolutionize multiple industries even today.

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Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Ashley Lebinski for sharing with us the story of Walter Hunt. And by the way, what happened to Hunt selling his patent for four hundred dollars and the person he sold it to making a fortune? All very often the inventors, well, they don’t make the money; it’s the businessmen who know how to take those inventions and make them profitable and make them able to scale and reach the mass public. The story of Walter Hunt, here on Our American Stories.