Buzz off! Despite historic efforts to swat them away, flies continue to flourish

“Keep Him From Your Child”: This cartoon appeared in the July 13, 1916, Arkansas Gazette, with news that houseflies had been found to spread poliomyelitis.
“Keep Him From Your Child”: This cartoon appeared in the July 13, 1916, Arkansas Gazette, with news that houseflies had been found to spread poliomyelitis.

There interposed a Fly --

With Blue -- uncertain -- stumbling Buzz --

Between the light -- and me ...

-- Emily Dickinson

There's a fly in the kitchen. Buzzing around.

photo

R.R. Montgomery submitted this drawing of the Fly-Killer to the U.S. Patent Office in 1899.

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Lows in the 40s outside, deep November, and yet we have this fly. This intolerable fly, lurking as a family gathers to share traditions -- the turkey, the cheese grits, the sidewise cylinder of cranberry sauce bearing soft ridges from the can.

Buzzz, says the fly, traditionally.

Die, we reply. Tradition!

But Arkansans haven't always felt compelled to kill houseflies on sight.

"Ancient peoples undoubtedly accepted them and merely brushed them aside," the late University of Arkansas entomologist J.L. "Jay" Lancaster Jr. observed in 1954, in the Proceedings of the Arkansas Academy of Science. "During colonial times there was a general feeling of tolerance toward the housefly, and this attitude still persists among some people today."

How did Arkansans go from merely being annoyed by flies to believing our safety requires their annihilation?

The answer lies in one of the nation's first public health crusades, popularized by a colorful medical character in Kansas and promulgated in this state by health officers, newspaper editors, educated ladies and civic boosters.

OPEN WINDOWS

Before the 19th century, the first choice for keeping flying critters out of a house was closure -- shut windows, shut doors. It wasn't a comfortable option in a sweltering Arkansas summer, and so why do it?

From our vantage point today, reaping the benefits of universal window screening and other 20th-century public health campaigns, we can look back and say, "Well, in 1916, the average life expectancy at birth in the United States was about 52. Today, it's nearly 79."

Basically, we are living as long as we do largely because of public-health-education drives, former dean Al Sommer told The Washington Post on the occasion of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's centennial in September. "It's all these interventions at the population level, like vaccinations and public sanitation."

The Baltimore school published a list of 100 items that affected public health in the 20th century. The list ranges from birth certificates to sidewalks to vitamin D milk (see bit.ly/2eY4Tta). Two of the items were

aimed directly at houseflies -- window screens and the flyswatter -- and that suggests what a breakthrough occurred when crusaders persuaded Americans to rid their homes of flies.

Now we realize that infectious diseases like flu and pneumonia are caused by invaders too tiny to see -- bacteria and viruses. But this "germ theory" of disease wasn't developed until the mid-19th century. Flies were annoying, but keeping them out wasn't the health-conscious American's top priority. As the curator's blog of the Glessner House Museum in Chicago notes, "Advertisements for wire window screens started to appear in the 1820s and 1830s, but the idea didn't take off."

Cheesecloth was sometimes tacked over window frames to limit pests. Loosely woven, it allows air to circulate, but it's easily torn, soils quickly and limits visibility. Why have a window you can't see out of?

The Civil War created a generation of believers among doctors. By the turn of the 20th century, medical researchers had fingered flies and mosquitoes as culprits in the transmission of many diseases, from malaria, dysentery and typhoid fever to pink eye.

According to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, after the war, public health officials and wire cloth manufacturers alike began promoting window and door screens as a first line of defense.

The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library (at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville) credits the popularization of window screens to a company of sieve makers in Connecticut. Gilbert and Bennett lost its Southern customers during the war. Looking at unused piles of the woven wire cloth used to make strainers, an employee got the lightbulb idea to paint that stuff to prevent rust and sell it as window screens.

SIX HOLES

Wire window screens were advertised in the Arkansas Gazette as early as 1883, and we can guess they were in common use by the well-to-do a decade later thanks to a murder reported by the Gazette in 1898.

John T. Orr, a prominent hardware merchant in Clarendon, had just returned from choir practice in the Methodist church. With his wife and baby asleep in their rooms, he was preparing lemonade when somebody fired a shotgun "heavily loaded with buckshot" through the back window.

Orr remained conscious long enough to say he had no idea who wanted to kill him. He died the next day.

Six holes were found in the wire screen.

SWAT THAT FLY

Late in the 19th century, the Gazette began carrying ads for chemical fly killers and sticky paper traps. For instance, the June 7, 1888, paper advertised "Dutcher's Fly Killer: Kills. Always ready. No trouble. Works quick; no danger. Every sheet will kill a quart of flies and brings peace and happiness."

Flyswatters weren't mentioned until after the century's turn.

Credit for inventing the first commercial flyswatter (not counting rolled newspaper) goes to Robert R. Montgomery of Decatur, Ill., who understood geometry and who on Oct. 13, 1899, filed a patent application for the Fly-Killer:

"In constructing an insect-killer in accordance with my invention a rectangular piece of wire-netting is used, such pieces being preferably oblong, and the handle end of the killer is formed by folding over the corners of one of the ends onto the body of the netting across each other on oblique lines extending from near the center of the narrow end well up along the broader sides. The folds are right-angled triangles with the bend on the hypotenuses ..."

Triangular folds produced the "whip-like swing of the flap," Montgomery wrote.

The sides of the folded rectangle had anti-fray binding, but the business end was left loose: "The fringe is useful in providing a softer end to the flap, whereby injury to articles subjected to sharp blows of the killer is reduced to a minimum," Montgomery's application states, adding, "it is not indispensable."

Montgomery was granted U.S. patent No. 640790 on Jan. 9, 1900. By 1901, he was advertising The King Fly Killer -- "Kills Without Crushing, Soils Nothing" -- in the Ladies Home Journal. According to The New York Times, Montgomery sold his patent in 1903 to John L. Bennett, who later invented the beer can.

The name "swatter" was the brainchild of Dr. Samuel J. Crumbine (1862-1954), who, at the turn of the 20th century, was secretary of the Kansas Board of Health and the nation's foremost campaigner against the housefly.

ENTER CRUMBINE

Crumbine had begun his practice of medicine in Dodge City (see "Wild West, violence in"). He walked streets shared by Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and Marshal Bill Tilghman. He had, let's say, confidence and a flair for marketing.

Kansas was especially afflicted with flies in summer 1905 when Crumbine attended a baseball game in Topeka. Various sources speculate that he became inspired as the crowd yelled, "Swat the ball" and "Get that fly." Whatever verbal alchemy occurred in his head, when he published his first "we-need-to-kill-these-flies" public health bulletin, he used the title "Swat That Fly."

His Fly Bulletins were written to be quoted: "The fly is the disseminator of the three D's: Dirt, Diarrhea and Disease; which often result in the three T's: Typhoid, Tuberculosis and Toxins; and which should teach us to cultivate the three C's: Care, Caution and Cleanliness."

He offered up verse:

I'm not an orientalist

I never wash my feet;

But every single chance I get

I walk on what you eat.

Buzz, buzz, busy fly ...

He commissioned a silent movie, The Busy Fly: A mother dips milk from a pail for her baby. "The Vile Fly" buzzes into the pail, and the mother dips another ladle. Enter "Sammy, A Smart Little Boy," who kills the fly and saves the day.

Crumbine's efforts inspired newspapers, including the pro-progress Arkansas Gazette, which reported his advice in favor of window screens as well as theories about painting the kitchen and barn blue and planting hops around windows and doors to ward off flies.

According to Thomas Fox Averill, a Kansas writer and radio commentator, the flyswatter really took off after a Boy Scout leader, Frank Rose of Weir City, visited Crumbine to show off the fly killers his boys had been making. Crumbine was offering a bounty for dead flies, "and to make that easier, the boys cut leftover screening into small squares and nailed them to the ends of yard sticks to make what they called 'Fly Bats,'" Averill writes.

Crumbine declared, "But that's not a fly bat, it's a flyswatter!" The Scouts went forth to hand out homemade "flyswatters" at fairs and at fly parades.

Averill describes a fly parade: "Children, dressed as flies, pushed baby carriages with coffins in them through the streets of their towns. They created huge flyswatters and chased each other down Main Street. They marched with bushel baskets of dead flies. In 1914, the school children of Hutchinson [Kan.] killed 224 pounds, 37 bushels of flies, for an estimated 7 million dead."

Crumbine was more and less immortalized as "Doc Adams," the character played by Milburn Stone on TV's long-running Western drama Gunsmoke.

Chemical killers of course remained popular, including the potentially deadly Daisy Fly Killer, which was a prettily decorated tin filled with felt and lead arsenate -- lead and arsenic. The Little Rock drugstore of Snodgrass & Bracy offered that for 15 cents in 1910. Add 3 cents for postage.

Judging by reports in the Arkansas Gazette, the anti-fly drive escalated dramatically in 1913, about the time that Dr. W.E. Wisdom of De Queen and Dr. E.W. Saunders of St. Louis suggested that infantile paralysis was a flyborne disease originating with limberneck chickens.

Although the nation's true poliomyelitis panics were yet to come, summer outbreaks of the emerging disease gnawed about the edges of calm. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Hookworm Commission and the Arkansas Board of Health were touring the state, urging farmers to control pestilential livestock flies.

June 24, 1913, the Gazette reported that more flyswatters had been sold in De Queen than ever in the history of the county.

June 10, 1913, the Young Men's Chamber of Commerce and Little Rock health officer Dr. O.K. Jodd contributed $27.50 toward a fund of $100, to be used to pay a bounty on dead flies. "It is believed the business men of Little Rock will subscribe liberally to the cause."

The campaign opened in April 1914, with little boys collecting 10 cents for every 100 fly carcasses they turned over to one C.M. Campbell at Little Rock City Hall.

It is safe to say that such efforts proved ultimately unsuccessful.

Continuous breeding accounts for the ability of the housefly to persist through winter as far north as New York, Lancaster wrote in 1954. If the temperature is at least 44 degrees, flies can breed.

And so they do. And then we swat them.

ActiveStyle on 11/28/2016

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