In 1900, Robert Montgomery, an entrepreneur from Decatur, Illinois, invented the first modern fly-killing device. He applied for a patent for this. It is a "cheap, durable, stretchy metal mesh," "rectangular," with "a handle attached to the other end." The material of the handle is unknown, but the material of the net is important: it reduces the force of the wind and makes the racket swing out "like a whip." In 1901, Montgomery's invention was advertised in the American Ladies' Home Journal, claiming that it killed flies virtually and left no trace, rather than directly saying that its power was equivalent to that of crushed newspaper.
In 1903, he sold the patent to an industrialist named John Bennet, who later invented the beer can. Bennet modified Montgomery's design, adding a seam around the edge of the metal mesh to protect it from fraying, but retaining its original name.
There were many types of fly-killing equipment on the market at the time, and the fly swatter was named after Samuel Crambin, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health. In 1995, he was inspired to name an announcement about flies "Swatt the Fly" after hearing everyone cheering while watching a football game. The article was to warn people about diseases spread by flies. He renamed his invention the fly swatter, the fly-killing device we use today.
Today, fly-catching technology is advancing rapidly, such as electric fly zappers (a charged tennis racket can directly roast flies to death) and fly guns (a rotating disk is used to catch flies). But there have always been softer solutions: flypaper (with a sticky side that catches flies), fly bottles (with a special liquid in the bottle), Venus flytraps (a plant that eats flies).
In an interview with CNBC in 2009, Obama killed a fly with his bare hands. He said with the joy of victory: "Finally caught this guy!" People from PETA were not very happy. , thinking this was a public "execution," gave the White House a fly-catching device that could catch flies and then release them.
But for the rest, as Sean Buyeni writes on his blog, “It’s hard to beat the old-school fly swatter.