Twenty years ago, when I was planning to buy new cutlery, I plumped for Jacobsen’s partly, I must confess, because it was in “2001.” Silly, I know, but it turned out to be the right decision, even though I made it for the wrong reason, because I have used it ever since.

Image A set of Jacobsen forks, a knife and other spoons. Credit... Georg Jensen

As well as being exemplary eating tools, the different pieces often serve dual purposes. The knives can be pressed into service as makeshift screwdrivers, and the tiny teaspoons are excellent at extracting the last drops of skin cream from the corners of containers, but the soup spoons are my favorites.

Unsurprisingly, designers often do their best work if they are likely to enjoy using the outcome, and Jacobsen loved soup. He often ate it for lunch in his studio and, after designing a stainless steel cocktail kit in the late 1960s, he carried it there each day in the martini mixer. His appreciation of the nuances of eating soup is evident in the design of his spoon.

Firstly, he made it asymmetrical by connecting the handle to the top of the end-piece, rather than to the center. If the spoon slips in your hand, the soup falls away from, rather than toward you. To ensure that both left-handed and right-handed people could use the spoon equally easily, Jacobsen designed a version for each. The handle extends to the left for the former, and to the right for the latter.

Secondly, by using the least possible material, he produced a spoon that is agreeably light, slender and comfortable to hold. Thirdly, Jacobsen chose the precise size of end-piece to deliver a perfectly judged quantity of soup to the mouth. He even finessed the shape to ensure that it is wide enough to cool the soup slightly, without losing all of its warmth, which can happen if it is too shallow. The soup tastes better, because Jacobsen anticipated what would happen at each stage of eating it.