The Endless Quest For a Better Mousetrap

Inventors have been refining them for centuries. What are they trying to achieve' From a report: Today, there are only a few kinds of mousetraps available at a typical hardware store: snap traps, glue traps, electric traps, bucket traps, and live-capture traps. And yet, inventors have filed more than forty-five hundred U.S. patents for animal traps, about a thousand of which are specifically related to mice. (Many inventors don't specify the intended targets of their traps.) Presumably, some mousetrap inventors have been spurred on by a quote widely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." Emerson probably never said exactly this; what he did write down, in a journal, was that the world would beat a path to the door of anyone who sold better corn, wood, boards, pigs, chairs, knives, crucibles, or church organs. There's nothing uniquely profitable about mousetraps. Still, people keep inventing them, probably because mice are such a widespread nuisance. Some inventors come up with mousetraps because of firsthand rodent experiences. One company well known for traps that can hold multiple mice at once, for instance, was founded by a janitor at an Iowa high school who noticed that mice were eating the students' lunches. But, just as there are too many mice, there are too many mousetraps. In a 2011 paper, Dagg, the schoolteacher, found that only four per cent of the mousetraps patented in the United States have been commercially produced -- and many designs are never even patented. The Trap History Museum, outside Columbus, Ohio, houses what is very likely the world's largest collection of mousetraps. Many of the designs on view there would be prohibitively expensive to mass-produce, given their unwieldy size or reliance on wacky technologies. Others barely work, having apparently been designed to function on only the rarest of occasions. Some designs are dreamy and imaginative; like contemporary art, they are valued for those qualities, not because they make it easier to keep a mouse-free home. You wouldn't pee in a toilet mounted on a gallery wall. Likewise, you wouldn't get much use out of a trap, patented in 1908, that affixes a jangly collar to a mouse so that it will annoy other mice until they flee their compatriot for the great outdoors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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