When it comes to mousetraps, Jack Hope has seen it all: trap doors, electrocution, spears driven by gunpowder.
But Hope, who researched the quest to build a better mousetrap for a much-quoted 1996 article in American Heritage Magazine, says one trap stands out as the “best American mousetrap there is” — the one invented in 1899 and still widely available at your local hardware store for about 75 cents.
He’s talking about the snap trap, basically a small pine board equipped with a few metal bars.
The snap trap first appeared just 10 years after one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s followers quoted him as saying, “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
Pennsylvania factory owner John Mast invented the trap to address his own mouse problem, then manufactured and aggressively marketed it.
Still made in Mast’s hometown of Lititz, Penn., now under the trade name Victor, the trap includes a bait pedal that triggers a spring-powered “killer bar”; the bar slams down on the mouse’s head or neck. Other companies make their own versions of the trap.
The only subsequent invention to have any impact on snap trap sales, Hope wrote in his 1996 article, was the glue trap of the 1980s, which works by sticking to the mouse’s feet. It meets two of Hope’s three criteria for successful mousetraps — cost and simplicity — but comes out behind in the area of “excess gore.”
The mouse tends to struggle, he says, and “ultimately dies of a heart attack in its frantic attempts to escape.”
Glue trap sales soared during the 1980s, then leveled off after making a 30 percent inroad in American snap trap sales, according to Hope’s article.
But if commercially viable mousetrap innovations have been few in the past 100 years, it hasn’t been for lack of trying. Every year there are 40 new mousetrap patents granted, Hope says.
About 4,500 traps have received patents in all, most in the years after Mast invented his blockbuster trap.
Hope, a writer and naturalist who has trapped hundreds of mice at his country home in upstate New York using the Victor snap trap, says the strangest mousetrap that’s come to his attention was the 1911 Electrocuting Trap invented by a team including A.A. Low of Horseshoe, N.Y.
The mouse was lured up three flights of stairs, 17 steps each, to the roof of the apparatus, where the creature reached for the bait, was electrocuted and fell through a trap door into a container of water. An electrified “counter” told how many mice had been caught.
Also unpromising: a combined mousetrap and collar box that required the gentleman of the 1870s to dispose of the live mouse in the “slop bucket” — a receptacle for human waste.
“There are things that just don’t work,” Hope says of other traps. “There are things that close on the mouse’s head that are cardboard — give me a break, cardboard!”
But if the road to a better mousetrap is paved with bad inventions, Americans can’t seem to stop dreaming, building and tinkering.
“There are thousands of people doing it every night,” Hope says.
