1868: Alvin J. Fellows of New Haven, Connecticut, receives a patent for a spring-click tape measure. His improved design creates a useful and enduring tool.

The invention originated in Sheffield, England, historic center of England's steel industry. An official city marker on an old factory there recounts that James Chesterman patented the spring tape measure in 1829. According to the plaque, he also "invented the self-winding window blind and the first woven metallic tape."

Chesterman was in the business of making "flat wire" for the fashion industry. Dressmakers used loops of it to hold the shape of the crinoline hoop skirts then in fashion. A really fluffed-out, layered hoop skirt could use 180 feet of the wire.

The inventive steelmaker had developed a heat-treating process that made the flat wire stronger and thus easier to produce in continuous unbroken lengths. But changing fashions would see the crinoline market fall flat, leaving the manufacturer up to his bustle with surplus metal tape.

Chesterman decided to put graduated marks on very long steel tapes, so he could market them to surveyors as a lightweight "Steel Band Measuring Chain." In contrast to heavy, bulky surveyors' chains, he touted that his product "has equal strength, greater correctness, is easier to clean, and to coil and uncoil, and is very much lighter and more compact."

Lightweight or not, Chesterman's tapes had a hefty price. They sold in the United States for $17 — about $300 in today's money.

Fellows' contribution was seemingly limited. His patent application acknowledged that he "fit the spiral or helical springs, to wind up the tape, in the usual way." But he proposed a novel method to attach the spring clip that locks the tape in "any desired position," so it doesn't retract until you release the clip.

The application made further concessions to the existing technology:

I am aware that metallic cases have been used with the same kind of main-spring, and with a click-spring attached to the removable side or cap of the case, by being soldered to its inner surfaces, and a knob attached to the outer surface of the said removable side, to release the click, and allow the tape to be drawn in by the mainspring; I therefore do not claim any such device.

What he did claim was that his improvements — a unique combination of a case, cover plate, click spring, lever and knob — constituted a new invention "when the whole is constructed, arranged, and fitted for use." They were incremental changes to a device for measuring increments.

And that's how a fellow named Fellows got the first U.S. patent for a spring tape measure.

Even so, the click-spring, steel tape measure did not attain immediate widespread use. The carpenter's folding wooden ruler remained the most popular collapsible measuring device in the United States until at least the 1940s.

Source: Various

*Image: Alvin J. Fellows' patent illustrations

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