And The World Did Not Beat A Path To His Door

Ralph Waldo Emerson never told you to build a better mousetrap. What he wrote, in an 1855 journal entry, was that if a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, "you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house." The mousetrap arrived thirty-four years later, in a book of quotations compiled by Sarah Yule from an address she remembered him giving. By then Emerson was seven years dead and in no position to object to becoming, posthumously, the patron saint of the American garage inventor.

It did not matter. The sentence escaped into the national bloodstream in its improved form — build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door — and Americans took it literally. The United States Patent Office has granted more patents for mousetraps than for any other device: more than four thousand of them, and they still arrive, about twenty a year, from people who believe the problem remains open.

It does not remain open. It closed in 1894, when William C. Hooker of Abingdon, Illinois patented the spring snap trap, and it was nailed shut in 1903 by John Mast of Lititz, Pennsylvania, whose improvement became the Victor — the five-cent machine that is still made, in Lititz, essentially unchanged, by the tens of millions.

This site is not about those two men. It is about everyone else: the four thousand who filed anyway — before, after, and in several cases repeatedly. Each believed, sincerely enough to pay the fee, that they had solved a solved problem. Their traps are presented here in their own words and their own drawings, without exaggeration, because none is needed.

They were promised a path. This is what they built beside it.