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Fruit Lifters / Corkscrew Copycats?

by Bob Roger

1870 - Wanted: A tool that can be pushed down, twisted, and pulled to remove a barrier to a

container's contents.

You say the corkscrew has already been invented? Hmmm.

Dried apples, dates, figs, apricots, peaches and many

other varieties of fruits, sugar, and meats including

pork and fish (in brine or dried) were packed into

wooden barrels, and the contents were tightly

compacted when the barrel head was pressed into

position with a large screw-driven one-sided vise.

Then the barrels were shipped via sea, rail, and wagon

to the local mercantile, where the heads were removed

and the contents offered for sale. The shipping of

dried fruits in barrels had ended by 1900, although

sugar continued to come in barrels for a short time

after that (Reference:

―

Fruit Lifters

‖

, Laurence A.

Johnson,

The Chronicle of the Early American Industries

Association,

March 1957).

What you never saw in any

―

Western

‖

movie was how the grocer got the tightly-

packed contents out of the barrel. What he did was pick up his trusty fruit auger, turn it

into the center of the mass a little way, and pull it out - just like pulling a cork out of a

bottle with a corkscrew. In fact, most of these implements resemble cork pullers but are

somewhat larger. With a small core removed, the sides of the hole could be loosened by

pushing them into the space vacated by the core. Other designs just loosened the

contents without pulling a core out.

Fruit lifter, dried fruit loosener, sugar devil, fruit auger - all of these names were used

by patentees to describe food-handling implements that were prominent in mercantiles

and general stores throughout the Victorian era, but which became obsolete around

1900. Strangely, they are also missing from many museums and implement collections.

The Patents

There were at least eleven U. S. patents for these tools, spanning about 25 years, and all

but two of the patentees were from the mid-West.