8/13/2019 Charles Forster

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Charles Forster was a marketing genius who might have sold a side of beef to a vegetarian. He was born in 1826 in Charlestown, Mass., into an old and aristocratic New England family. While working for his uncle's import/export business in Brazil, he noticed that the natives had beautiful teeth, which he attributed to their use of handcrafted toothpicks. At a time when virtually everything was becoming mass produced, Forster vowed to make a fortune producing wooden toothpicksso cheaply by machine that he could export them to South America.

Forster himself was not mechanically inclined, but he had the business savvy toacquire the rights to a patent that gave him a monopoly on a toothpick-making process. It was a byproduct of the work of Boston inventor Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant, whose own passion was making shoes by machine. At the time, most shoes were put together with wooden pegs, and the weak link in the operation was supplying pegs of uniform quality. This led Sturtevant to concentrate on producing longstrips of knife-edged veneer from which pegs could be sliced off. Forster saw that toothpicks could be made in much the same way, and by 1870, his operation was capable of producing millions of toothpicks per day. But he could not find a market for them in Boston.

The Yankee tradition was to whittle a toothpick on demand. It did not make senseto spend money on something one could make for oneself, let alone for somethingthat would be used once and then discarded. But Forster came up with ingeniousmarketing schemes.

To get toothpicks into restaurants, Forster hired Harvard men. After they had finished dining on Forster's dime at a local establishment, such as the Union Oyster House, they demanded wooden toothpicks. When they were told none were available, the students raised a ruckus and vowed never to eat there again. Naturally,when Forster came around some days hence, the restaurant manager purchased boxesof toothpicks to distribute to his customers.

It was a common observation of the time that many of the young men standing in front of a good hotel chewing toothpicks were suggesting they had eaten in its fine dining room, when in fact they could not afford to do so. In time, chewing atoothpick anywhere became a sign of contentment and insouciance. In his Life onthe Mississippi, Mark Twain described feeling that he knew the river so well that he found himself cocking his cap and "wearing a toothpick" while at the wheel

of his riverboat.

Thus, the toothpick took on a life of its own, serving not only as a utilitarianobject but also as a status symbol and even as an accessory. While Charles Forster may never have dreamed that his toothpicks would have such unintended ancillary uses, he would no doubt have welcomed them as extensions of his initial marketing efforts.