A Better Mousetrap · Part 19 of 30

One piece of wire, 1894

Act III: Four hundred years of resetting · November 14, 2026

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William C. Hooker's 1894 patent drawing, Fig. 1: a flat wooden base with a coiled wire spring across the middle, a wire jaw held back by a locking bar, and a small trigger plate with a bait hole at the front. — William C. Hooker, US Patent 528,671, 1894, Fig. 1. Public domain.

Part 18 was a sentence about a better mousetrap. Twelve years after a newspaper printed it, a man in Illinois was granted a patent for a new one.

The patent

On 6 November 1894, William C. Hooker of Abingdon, Illinois, was granted US patent 528,671, for an “Animal-Trap”. He had applied that March.

He said what he was after in the first lines: “for catching mice and rats, a simple, inexpensive and efficient trap”, one that could sit by a rat-hole and be “sprung by the animal passing over it when not attracted by the bait.”

One piece of wire

The base is a flat board, “preferably constructed of wood”. Across it sits the part the patent is built on: a single piece of springy wire, bent into an arm, coiled into a spring, and carried on into a loop that is the jaw.

To set it, you swing the jaw back against the spring and hold it there with a locking bar. The far end of the bar is held by a small catch on a trigger at the front, and the trigger has a hole for the bait. A mouse can’t reach the bait without touching the trigger, and “the slightest pressure on the trigger will cause the springing of the trap.”

The patent even gives the easy way to set it: turn the trap upside down, lay the end of the bar over the catch, and the catch takes hold of it by itself.

Our drawing of Hooker’s trap from the side. A wooden base, a coiled spring in the middle, a wire jaw held back by a locking bar that hooks onto a trigger plate at the front, with bait on the trigger. A touch on the trigger frees the bar, and the jaw swings over the spring and snaps down on the front of the base. Then the jaw is swung back and the bar hooked on again, by hand: one catch, one reset.

The trap you already know

Put Hooker’s drawing beside a wooden snap trap from a hardware store today and the parts line up: board, coiled spring, wire jaw, locking bar, baited trigger. It’s cheap, it’s quick, and it fits beside a mouse hole.

It does one mouse at a time. Then someone has to come and set it again, by hand, for the next one.

That’s the problem this series keeps coming back to: every trap has to be reset. Mascall’s mill had answered it in 1590, and two inventors again in 1861. Hooker’s trap didn’t try to.

Next, part 20: Leeds.

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Sources

William C. Hooker, Animal-Trap, US Patent 528,671, granted 6 November 1894, application filed 14 March 1894 (Serial No. 503,629): specification, claims and drawings (Figs. 1 to 3). Google Patents: patents.google.com/patent/US528671A/en . Every quote on this page is from it.