My dad, like many dads—at least in the kind of suburbia I grew up in outside Sacramento, which is to say the transiently comfortable, wistfully aspirational milieu that rings most American cities—spent a good deal of his time pontificating about the great ideas he’d had and failed to capitalize on. A programmer, he’d conceived of a novelty product called Computer Bug Spray long before wiseguys got rich selling Y2K Bug Spray ahead of the impending apocalypse. Or at least Dad believed they got rich. Them. Shoulda’ been him! (It even got rubbed in his face by the paper and his local news.) He also had an idea for a low-profile electric plug. I can still remember him miming how you’d use it: “You plug the thing in,” he’d say, jabbing his hand like it held a rapier, “Then you twist it flat.” He’d swivel his wrist with a flourish, and somehow the invisible plug would be flush with the wall. I could never make sense of it. (Supremely confident but unclear communication was another hallmark of neighborhood dads where I grew up, as was a constant, low-grade indignation at being misunderstood.)
Dad’s plug idea never made him rich, and it never made me rich either, unlike the scion of the family that invented packaged lettuce who was college roommates with one of my old football teammates. But Dad’s idea did make me attentive to plugs, odd as that sounds: not just how obtrusive they are, but when they feel chintzy, when they're just plain ugly, and, most importantly, how difficult they can be to pull loose. Surely it’s a failure of design that the second thing every child is taught about electricity, after "don’t put your finger in the socket," is "don’t pull the plug out by the cord"—and yet everyone does it. So when PM did our recent waffle maker test, I noticed that Breville’s waffle maker had a distinctive plug: Just behind the prongs, the plug widens out and there’s big hole in the middle. Slip your finger through the loop and it’s easy to yank the thing free from pretty much any angle. I’d never seen another plug like it.
Breville calls it the Assist Plug. Turns out they invented it themselves, in the late 1980s in their native Australia, where plugs are three-pronged monstrosities that sort of look like the Scream mask. (Type I, for outlet nerds.) Richard Hoare, Breville’s design and innovation director, told me over email that the Australian plugs take “some force” to remove, and Breville was getting reports that customers were having trouble with them. So they designed a solution.
It was successful enough that, for a while, it had a place in their logo.
When Breville brought the Assist Plug to the U.S., they had to redesign it to work with our NEMA 5-15 outlets. (There you go, nerds.) The loop requires rerouting the plug’s internal wiring; in Australia, where the loop is oriented vertically, the wires could all be routed underneath. For the North American plug, where the loop is oriented horizontally, the leads were split and passed around either side. In fact, for something that seemed so trivial when I first saw it—just a molded plastic ring, I thought—the considerations were myriad. “The challenge,” Hoare explained, “was to design a plug with an adequate finger hole size, with enough room for the wires, without being too large for standard socket requirements.” And just take finger hole size—here’s the process Breville had to go through:
“The shape and size of the hole required considerable tuning and refinement. We started with anthropometric data on the range of sizes of human fingers. Through trial with people with various size fingers we realized the hole needed to accommodate the finger to between the first and second knuckle. We sized the hole using this data and then tested it again using people who represented a full range of finger size. The hole was then shaped for comfort.”
After all that work, Breville rightfully patented the Assist Plug with the U.S. Patent Office in 2002. And even though they eventually took it out of their logo, they started incorporating the plug’s loop into other aspects of their product designs. It can now help you steam milk for a cappuccino, poach an egg, beat an egg, or blend up a shake.
THE FINGER LOOP IS EVERYWHERE
the Barista Express®
(Steam Wand)
(Poacher Probe)
(Beaters Release)
(Blender Lid)
That patent probably explains why I’ve never seen another plug quite like it. That and the fact that it costs more to make: Hoare says competitors have copied the Assist Plug over the years, but find the cost of ordering nonstandard cord sets to be to be too much to bear. These are the things—costs of production, anthropometric data sets, wire routing—I’m sure my dad never thought about when he had his dream of inventing a better electrical plug. (Even though one of his favorite shows mined comedy from this exact kind of challenge.) I think Dad believed inventing things was easy, or at least that once you had a good idea, making a mint was practically inevitable. But there’s a million dads in a million suburban garages pulling on a million beers and complaining about the jerks who had the same idea they had, after them, and made a million bucks. There’s probably only one dad in the upscale part of town who got there by putting in the considerable time, money, and frustration required to bring an idea to fruition. Inventing is hard. Dad kind of inadvertently taught me that. One of many lessons. But in fact, I’m glad it shook out the way it did for him. Because instead of toiling away in isolation with a soldering iron and miles of rubber sheathing, my dad, like many dads, instead spent his time going to work, providing for our family, shooting hoops with us, and teaching my brother and me another lesson—one far more valuable, since I'm sure not an inventor: how to diagnose a poor design, and recognize a great one.
Kevin is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. In past lives he’s been an economist, computer salesman, mathematician, barista, and college football equipment manager.
