Have You Ever Wondered Who Created the Fly Swatter?

You're minding your own business. You are enjoying a nice cold beverage outside, sitting in your lawn chair in your favorite pair of shorts. It never fails; along comes some mean fly biting your legs, your arms; What the heck? Why?  You put up with it for a few minutes before you head into the house looking for something to stop the pain.  You see it.  The Fly Swatter.

You wonder. Who in the world invented this contraption? How long did we go without having it?  And how many newspapers were used to get rid of these biting bugs before we started looking into doing something about it?

The Fly Swatter was created in the year 1900 by a man named Robert. R. Montgomery, who was an Entrepreneur from Decatur, Illinois.

It was originally called "The Fly Killer" quite appropriately, and it was so popular that it was featured in Lady's Home Journal in 1903, as a device that "kills without crushing and soils nothing."

Robert ended up selling the rights to his Fly Killer to a man named John L. Bennet. You might recognize his name, as he was the inventor of the beer can. Bennett improved the original design by sewing around the netting, however The Fly Killer didn't get it's name that we know it as today, until the year 1905 when a man named Samuel Crumbine, who was the Secretary of the Kansas Board of Health entitled one of his bulletins on fly born diseases, "Swat The Fly:" After he heard the words chanted at a baseball game. He took an invention that was a yard stick with a screen on it called, "The Fly Bat" and renamed it, "The Fly Swatter."

So the next time your sitting in your chair, swatting away at flies, you can thank these three men for giving us the simple device that saves us from so many uncomfortable bites, and gives us something to do when we are bored.