"Left all alone in some punkensh place, like a rusty tin coat hanger hanging in space..."
Dr. Seuss, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (1973)
Patented more than 200 times in the United States alone, the humble coat hanger has undergone many transformations to reach its modern incarnation.
Various methods of hanging clothes had probably existed before Britain's Queen Victoria was gifted a set of wooden coat hangers for her wedding in 1840, however, the mass-market wire hanger was not invented until 1903. The story goes that Albert Parkhouse, an employee of the Timberlake Wire and Novelty company, a Michigan-based firm that specialized in wire lampshade frames, was irritated by arriving at work one day to find that all the coat hooks were in use. Seizing a piece of wire, he bent it into two large oblong hoops and then twisted both ends at the center into a hook. As was common practice among nineteenth-century companies, Timberlake patented the wire coat hanger in January 1904, and made a fortune whereas Parkhouse never got a penny.
The Timberlake wire coat hanger soon proved very popular. By 1906 it was being used by Meyer May, a men's clothier, to display clothes in store. In 1932, Schuyler C. Hulett added a cardboard tube mounted on the upper and lower parts of the wire to prevent the wire from marking the clothes. In 1935, Elmer D. Rogers brought the coat hanger closer to what we know by adding a tube on the lower bar. Today, hangers are made from wood, metal, and plastic.
