What’s the Point?

In times past, it was more important for many things to be sharper than we now care about. This applied not only to weapons, such as swords, spears, and arrows – but also to culinary ware, when animal parts often went directly from the place of killing to the place of cooking. And, in pre-modern eras, before plastic became so common, it was frequently convenient to have a good cutting edge readily available – which is why so many people carried at their belts, usually in a leather sheath, some kind of small sharp knife. And all this is not to mention, in more turbulent times and places than our own, the actual need for having a ready means of self-defense.

But for most of us nowadays – at least as far back as the schooldays I remember – the first need to sharpen anything arose in connection with pencils, which were usually cylinders of wood surrounding a writing-core of graphite. In England, the sharpening was done with a little folding knife, which boys carried in their pockets, or girls in their bags. In America, however, by that time, there was usually in each classroom, a mechanical sharpener, hand-operated by a crank-lever. It was made to hold the shavings, which periodically had to be shaken out and disposed of. That was a job for one of the students, appointed to be something like the “pencil monitor.”

But the sharpest thing most of us encounter in daily life is a needle. Modern engineering made it possible to put an “eye” on that instrument – that is, a hole at one end, which, in turn enabled an inventive American genius named Isaac Singer to perfect a sewing machine – one of the key inventions of the era which also produced Thomas Edison. Having a hole going through it crosswise was only the beginning of the miracles which could be done with needles. Modern Medicine (of course including dentistry) was virtually transformed when the innovation of a hollow needle allowed for the injection of substances beneath the skin without the need to make any kind of incision.

I wish that I could write about all this in a totally impersonal manner, but unfortunately it recalls one of the most unhappy incidents of my life, which occurred when I was only nine years old. While tossing a ball with a friend, one of us threw it up quite high. We both ran to catch it, looking upwards, and our heads collided. His forehead met my mouth. He soon healed, but both of my two upper front teeth were badly damaged. When I was taken to a dentist the next day, he approached me with a needle, of which I was so frightened that I ran out of the office and made my own way home. That was only the beginning of many years of dentistry.

Somehow, I lost my fear of needles, the bad teeth were removed, and thereafter I wore various devices to “bridge” the gap. I must say that from then on, when dentally necessary, I was given gas. 

But long before our own era, pins and needles had many different uses, particularly in fastening clothing. This helps us to understand a part of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy, in which he is considering suicide and its possible justifications, and even one possible method and instrument. After listing some of the miseries of life (including “The Law’s Delay”) Hamlet asks, in effect, why would anyone put up with all that if we could be sure of totally ending everything merely “with a bare bodkin”? 

A bodkin was one of the large pins used to hold clothing together – a relatively clumsy method, which was finally replaced by one of the great modern inventions – the Safety-Pin. That device was invented by an American named Walter Hunt, who patented it in 1849. As is the story with many other great technical advances, however, the inventor never derived much benefit from it, while other more business-minded investors and companies did.

But we cannot conclude this pointed discussion without paying tribute to the early developers of Geometry. At school, I was fascinated by its beautiful logic. It begins with nothing, i.e., a “Point,” which has no substance and no dimensions, but does have a location. Only when it moves does it become a line.

And I couldn’t resist turning that into an epigram:

“I studied Geometry, but never found out
whether life is a straight line or a circle.”