Cheese knife. History of invention and production

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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
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Cheese knife. History of invention and production

The history of technology, technology, objects around us

Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us

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"The trouble is, if the pieman begins to sew boots," - all of us have known these wise words since childhood. Meanwhile, the history of the invention of a knife for thinly slicing cheese proves that the wise are not always right. Norway is not particularly rich in inventors. Until the 1925th century, there was not even a patent office in the country, and Johan Waaler, the author of the most famous Norwegian invention - a paper clip - had to patent it in Germany. But in 36, when XNUMX-year-old cabinetmaker Thor Bjorklund from Lillehammer came up with a great idea, a patent office was already in place in Norway.

cheese knife
Björklund knife (Osthyve)

Thor Bjorklund was an excellent master of his craft, and by nature he was a real perfectionist. He also loved cheese. Therefore, according to legend, Thor became extremely angry when one summer day, due to hot weather, a piece of hard cheese became soft. Of course, it wasn't the fact itself that brought him into a bad mood, but the fact that he couldn't cut the sandwich cheese into even, thin slices.

It was probably then that the carpenter came up with the idea of a device that would cut cheese equally evenly and thinly, regardless of consistency. He remembered the tool he used every day - an ordinary planer. "A planer," Bjorklund reasoned something like this, "removes even chips of almost the same thickness from pine, oak, and beech boards. Why not make a planer that removes chips ... from cheese?"

The idea turned out to be fruitful and not too difficult to implement. Having made several prototypes, Bjorklund was convinced of its performance and on February 27, 1925 received a patent for Ostehovel, which means "cheese knife" in Norwegian. Two years later, he founded his own company for the production of "planers" and faced two serious problems.

The first was quite expected: due to a very simple design, numerous counterfeit productions began to arise, so in two years the inventor collected more than a hundred different "pirated" fakes (which indirectly indicates the high popularity of the invention). But the second problem turned out to be completely unexpected: it was almost an open confrontation on the part of ... cheese producers!

The train of thought of the cheese makers was quite understandable. "If anyone can cut the cheese into very thin slices, the amount of cheese bought will drop significantly."

Cheese makers launched a wide propaganda campaign calling for the abandonment of "planers" and the use of ordinary knives. However, it soon became clear that sales of cheese not only did not decrease, but, on the contrary, increased: the thinness of the slices made it possible to buy cheese even for very poor buyers. As a result, the Bjorklund knife has become extremely popular among both the rich and the poor - more than 50 million such knives have been produced since the company was founded.

Author: S.Apresov

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