A Factory Worker Ran Out of Coat Hooks and Bent a Piece of Wire Into a Shoulder
The story told at Timberlake Wire and Novelty is that Albert Parkhouse came in one winter morning in 1903, found every hook taken, and twisted a length of wire into two ovals and a hanger. His employer patented it.
US822127 was granted to John B. Timberlake in 1906 for a garment hanger. Timberlake owned the Timberlake Wire and Novelty Company in Jackson, Michigan. The man usually credited with the idea worked for him.
The account passed down at the company is that in 1903 an employee named Albert J. Parkhouse arrived at work on a cold morning and found that every coat hook in the cloakroom was already taken. Rather than leave his coat on the floor, he picked up a piece of the wire the factory used for lampshade frames, bent it into two oblong loops that matched the slope of a coat's shoulders, and twisted the ends together into a hook.
Under the employment terms of the period, an invention made on company time with company material belonged to the company. Timberlake filed the patent. Parkhouse is generally said to have received nothing beyond his wages.
Why the shape works
A wire hanger is doing something more specific than holding cloth off the ground.
Garments deform under their own weight. A coat hung on a peg carries all of its mass at one point, which stretches the fabric there and puts a permanent dent in the shoulder. The hanger spreads that load across the full width of both shoulders, along a line that approximately matches the shape a body would make.
The slope is the part people miss. A straight bar would still concentrate stress at the outer corners. The downward angle of each side follows the natural fall of a shoulder, so the garment sits the way it was cut to sit.
The twisted neck and hook exist for a reason too. The wire is a single continuous piece, so there are no joints to fail, and the twist stiffens the neck against the torque of a heavy coat swinging on a rail.
The disputed part
Parkhouse's story is well attested locally and appears on a historical marker in Jackson, but the documentary chain is thin, and the hanger has other claimants.
O. A. North of Connecticut received a patent for a garment hanger in 1869, decades earlier. Various shoulder-shaped supports appear in the record through the late nineteenth century. Whether Parkhouse arrived at the shape independently on a cold morning or reinvented something already circulating is not something the surviving evidence settles.
What is documented is the patent, and it carries his employer's name.
The afterlife
The wire hanger became free. Dry cleaners handed them out by the billion with every order, which made them the default hanger in most American closets and created a recycling problem that laundries still deal with.
They are also genuinely bad at their job for anything heavy. Thin wire concentrates the load along a narrow edge and creases knitwear, which is why every clothing store uses molded plastic or wood instead.
See the original
The full text and figures of US822127 are on patents.us.
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