THE clothespeg has an ancient look. The simplest sort, with rounded head and body carved from a single piece of wood, might have come from an Egyptian tomb or a Mesoamerican midden. Their shape is vaguely anthropomorphic, like a forked mandrake root (“dolly peg” is the name in commerce), suggesting an offering to the gods of fertility, or of nature. It would be no surprise to find one in an Iron Age settlement, still attached to an Iron Age loincloth.

Odd, then, that the first such peg is not recorded until the early 19th century. The Roman soldiers at Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s Wall, did not peg up the thick socks for which they wrote desperate letters home; Lady Macbeth’s maid did not peg up the damp, still-spotted gown. Even Samuel Pepys did not expect to see his shirt, soused after a session at the Cock in Fleet Street, tethered with small wooden clips to a line. Instead, the clothespeg came only just in time to pinion Shelley’s tear-stained handkerchiefs from the wild west wind.

Before this, it appears, drying garments were simply hung over a line (as painted on a wall in Pompeii), or spread out on grass, as shown in illuminated manuscripts of surprisingly tranquil and unsteady laundry days. For John Clare, the peasant-poet of industrialising England, hedges were as likely to be blowing with underwear as with the blossoms of the sloe or the wild cherry. The fierce spines of the blackthorn or hawthorn held a petticoat as well as anything.

Some say fishermen first thought up pegs, to clip their nets to the rigging. But only one name emerges from the sea-fog, that of Jérémie Victor Opdebec, who took out a patent for the dolly peg in 1809, and of whom nothing else is known. He sounds Belgian. According to a charming fake biography by a mid-20th-century French cabaret group, Les Quatre Barbus, he had a scientific bent from boyhood, inventing devices to de-pip currants and to muzzle ants, but it was the desperate sight (and the faint song) of too-light lingerie fluttering perilously on the line that inspired his biggest brainwave.

Time, and the market, were just about ripe for him. People were cramming into cities, the drying grounds and hedges were receding, and clotheslines criss-crossed like cats’ cradles between slum windows. Besides, once the nifty little device became common, uses far removed from laundry could be found. When Charles Dickens suffered a seizure, a clothespeg was thrust between his teeth to stop him biting his tongue. In Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”, Amy slept nightly with a peg on her nose to try to make it thinner (a method tried, too, by Diane Keaton). Cartoon characters found them a hands-free way of keeping nasty smells at bay. They are now used to keep food fresh and tablecloths flat, clip gels or diffusers to film lights, correct the hang of curtains, hold lit matches longer, squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste from a tube; in short, for so many essential tasks that humans may well wonder how they ever managed without them.

Practical and relatively newfangled they may be; but pegs also carry overtones of ancient mystery. In Britain they were made from two woods, willow and hazel, with magical associations. (Americans prefer ash and beech.) Willow is therapeutic, and soothes pain. In many cultures it is a tree of conversation and communion, of secret answers shrouded by leaves beside singing rivers. Its wood has something of the spring of water in it: that same elasticity that allows it to be woven into fences, baskets and traps, and can be sensed when a cricket bat, the finest use of willow, shivers under the ball. Hazel is watery, too: the favourite wood for dousing. The dowser’s forked stick is like nothing so much as a larger-scale peg, with the legs pulled outward.

Britain’s early pegmakers were woodland bodgers in open-sided shacks, farmers keeping idle hands busy in winter, and, especially, gypsies. Like the other items in the gypsy’s basket—lucky charms made of recycled tin, bunches of white heather tied with a ribbon and artificial orange flowers, somewhat like chrysanthemums, created by whittling slivers from an elder branch—pegs carried a hint of ancient magic. Gypsy pegs had a streaked, rough-hewn look, as if brushed with ash from the open fire, and a little ring of reclaimed tin near the top to hold the wood together. In other ages and places gypsies had been smiths and metalworkers, implying brief spells of settlement; the tin ring was a relic of old trade. In modernising Britain, where they were continually moved on by the police, they relied for their livelihood on roadside, riverbank or passing woods: itinerant production from whatever grew wherever they chanced to be.

In this uneasy coexistence between Travellers and settled society, pegs became the currency of choice. It was an odd exchange. Consumers did not ask for them, and those who produced them barely used them themselves. They were things the gorgios, or non-gypsies, were thought to want, like fortune-tellings and palm-readings, which after a while became a habit. They were cheap as words.

Pegs were also seasonal; almost as much so as primroses or acorns. They underpinned the gypsy economy in months when they could not pitch their caravans at the edge of fields or orchards, tying wheat or picking hops. In the 1870s it was reckoned gypsy women could make 12-18 shillings a week hawking pegs in cities and towns, more than enough to live on. By the 1930s the going rate for pegs was tuppence a dozen, and shopkeepers would sometimes order them by the gross, exchanging them for goods rather than cash. In the 1950s the author of this piece—with the pram in which she was sleeping—was wheeled off by a gypsy in exchange for a wand of pegs in Maidstone High Street. Their value was clearly judged equivalent. Perhaps sadly (for a gypsy upbringing was still judged romantic then), both items were swiftly handed back again.

The currency of wanderers

The author’s uncle, a sheep-farmer on Romney Marsh (which, like Maidstone, is in Kent), makes pegs any time he spots a good side-branch, though it’s best in spring when the sap is up and the bark falls off almost by itself. The only wood for him is grey willow, common round the ditches of the marsh. You never get a splinter, he says, out of a good grey-willow peg; with use, his grandmother’s became as smooth as silk. Farmers who disliked gypsies (sadly, an undying breed) used to root out grey willow deliberately to thwart them.

Pegs take no time to make once he gets going. The side-branch naturally provides a knob at the top to stop the splitting; he uses a pair of pliers to pinch under the knob, then splits up with a sharp knife until the two sides start, just, to spring apart. Then he prises the sappy centre out. His preferred tool is an ivory-handled Victorian penknife with a large blade and, inevitably, a gadget for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. The cleaned-up pegs, still damp, are pushed on a thin stick. They will be dry by morning, and an evening will provide a bucketful.

Men being what they are, though, they could not leave the clothespeg alone. Simplicity, surely, could be improved on with artful complication. The first American patent, dating from 1832, articulated a bent hickory stick with a wooden screw, which didn’t work. As the century passed, American inventors added extra legs or bits of metal to a device which, in the right hands, was just natural wood doing its own thing. By 1887, 146 peg-patents had been applied for. A display in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington shows several of the patentees, tied to labels as large as themselves, with their designer’s names and dates in proud copperplate.

“Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies”

It could be argued—and still is—that a metal adjunct is not an invention, merely a modification. Nonetheless David M. Smith’s “new and useful or improved...spring clamp for clothes lines” (1853) made him the inventor of the modern articulated peg. His design, as he described it in almost erotic detail, featured two levers conjoined with a spring so that “the two longer legs may be moved toward each other and at the same time move the shorter ones apart”, in harmonious opposition. His last diagram showed Opdebec’s design, “the common wooden clothes pin in common use”, as he scornfully described it. It was inferior because it had to be pushed on garments like a prong. By contrast, his own peg delicately clipped them to the line.

Inevitably that too was improved, by Solon E. Moore in 1887, with a “coiled fulcrum” of wire. Both inventors were Vermonters, and their brainwaves fired up industrialisation in the state: Montpelier versus Waterbury, the United States Clothespin Company versus the National Clothespin Company, with both vying (given the latitude) to produce pins that “cannot freeze or lock on the line, as they will open at the top and let the snow and ice out”. By the early 20th century the equivalent of 500,000 board-feet of lumber (perhaps 700 tonnes) a year, in the form of sawmill waste, were being pulled from the Green Mountains to make pegs at a rate of more than 20,000 a day.

The Smith-Moore peg is a triumph of design, equally pleasing when mini (to clip a sprig of lavender to a martini glass, or a favour to a wedding menu) or when maxi, as in Claes Oldenburg’s 14-metre-high steel “Clothespin” in Philadelphia. In 150 years, this item has not been improved on. Scott Boocock of Alice Springs has just invented the Heg, a plastic peg with hooks, inspired by his struggles to pin out his wife’s cocktail dress; but something much like it, in dark Victorian wood, sits in the Smithsonian.

The motive behind all this is control: to win man’s, or usually woman’s, eternal contest with the wind. Smith’s patent claimed to offer protection against the “evil” of things blowing off the line: not merely inconvenience, but existential disorder and wrong. Wind would now be put in its place. Although pegs might suggest domestic servitude and toil, they also asserted possession, tidiness and small, quick triumphs: a full, billowing clothesline is a victory of sorts. Hence the hymn of praise to Opdebec set by Les Quatre Barbus, its French original vaguely fitting the main theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: for though hurricanes might thunder and storms might rage, the humble peg was a beacon of hope, holding everything together. It might be the saviour not merely of a row of shirts, but of human civilisation.

True, the sheer joy of seeing laundry blow safe-anchored on a line is regularly dashed by having to run outside, when the clouds mass, and grab tumultuous armfuls as the first drops fall. But even that loss of command can now be remedied: the Omo laundry company has devised a smartpeg called Peggy, of red plastic, which can send messages from your washing line to your smartphone informing you when the sheets are dry, and when it is going to rain.

Balancing this conquest of the elements, however, came loss of social control. In cities and, especially, suburbs, a clothesline is a semaphore of gossip and the pegs little telltales, wagging their knowing heads. A sudden parade of nappies, a startling array of saucy smalls (impossible without pegs), the vanishing of a man’s overalls, even the sad listing of sparse pegs on a line that was full before, may all announce what has not been publicly admitted. “Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies,” sighs the simple but luscious Polly Garter in “Under Milk Wood”. The voice of the First Drowned faintly asks whether washing is still on the line in the world above, as though with his own death it must have disappeared.

Flapping in the trade winds

Through this cosy domesticity, as the years ran on, the winds of globalisation and technological change blew as coldly as elsewhere. In sunny cities such as Naples and Valencia, the clothesline still reigned supreme; but by 1920 America’s wooden-clothespin-makers were struggling, crying fruitlessly for protective tariffs against the Swedes and the Chinese. Flat-dwelling, and the sighing boom of the tumble-drier, gradually cut deep into demand. In 2009 the last domestic peg clittered off the production line, and the last owner of the National Clothespin Company was buried under a five-foot reclining version, in grey granite, that looked as dead as he was.

Clothespin: Claes Oldenburg Odd then, but true, that at the same moment, in various places, sales of pegs began to soar. In 2007 Asda, a supermarket chain, reported that British sales had risen by 1,400% in the first four months of the year compared with the year before. Such a spike was mystifying, and a shock. Moreover, plastic pegs (which degraded in sunlight) were losing out to traditional wooden ones. The switch to wood was a by-product of nascent hipster culture, with its love of beards, craft beer, bicycles-with-baskets, milk-rounds and all things retro; the return to pegs, though, seemed part-caused by guilt at the amount of carbon dioxide, 1.5kg, emitted by each cycle of a tumble-drier. The two trends together resulted in a renaissance. Along the back-roads of both New and Old England, smaller companies sprang up again to make thousands of wooden artisan pegs of good hazel and ash. Modern craft fairs now seem to be held together by them. Much comes down, again, to their anthropomorphic charm. Along with pegs has come a revival of peg dolls, dressed up, with scraps of cloth, into the tiny forked humans they so strongly resemble. One of the few things that could be said of their mysterious and possibly fictitious creator, Opdebec, was that his name rhymed most usefully with mec (roughly “bloke”), a hard little word somehow apt, too, for his hard little wooden inventions. For all their mass-production and plastic incarnation, pegs may also be a charm or totem after all. Even those massed plastic Chinese legions lie in their packs like tomb soldiers, ready to be deployed. The claims made for Oldenburg’s “Clothespin”, however, show that their significance can go way beyond that. This apotheosis of the peg began in a fittingly ordinary way. In 1967, as he left one day for the airport, Oldenburg slipped a clothespeg into his pocket. As his flight approached Chicago shortly afterwards, he held up the pin against the skyscrapers below and thought it could vie with them. Sketches followed, in which colossal pegs of “a certain Gothic character” stood with their heads in windblown clouds. Yet the more he considered the two leaning parts, joined by metal rings, the more Oldenburg compared them to Brancusi’s cubist stone lovers in the Philadelphia Art Museum. (“Cpin=kiss”, he scribbled on the print.) From this thought, sown in the public consciousness, flowed a dozen others. The immense clothespin, according to the city’s boosters, links Philadelphia’s colonial heritage to its difficult present; it reflects the city’s efforts to close the gap between rich and poor; and in its evocation of simple, domestic things it brings all men and women together. Chief in the mind of the sculptor remained the simple thought of two lovers embracing. The same idea seems to have drifted through Smith’s mind as he wrote his patent proposal, and through the minds of many pegmakers, dealing with the simple spring and return of a piece of cloven wood. From this elemental urge to get together sprang all humankind—with its triumphs, its failures, its endeavours and its ingenuity.

Correction (January 6th): A previous version of this story said that Meg from “Little Women” slept with a clothespeg on her nose. It was in fact her sister, Amy, who tried the nose-thinning technique. Apologies to Louisa May Alcott and her readers.