Interesting Facts About Lazy Susans
Scrabble players and Chinese restaurant enthusiasts know how useful lazy susans can be. The swiveling, circular, tabletop trays used to rotate food and other items on large tables have made many people’s lives much easier for many years. It is easy to take them granted, but the history of the lazy susan is more interesting than you might expect, and its uses more pervasive than you might think.
While such a useful device seems as though it would have been developed early on in human affairs, but the invention of the lazy susan as we know it is generally traced to the 18th Century. Its invention is actually attributed by many to Thomas Jefferson. Originally it was called a “dumbwaiter”, meaning a silent server to be used in place of an actual waiter. Today “dumbwaiter” refers to a type of manual service elevator.
Some speculate that the name “lazy susan” originated from the use of the word “Susan” to refer to maids and other female servants in the early 1800s. The device was a supposedly a replacement for lazy servants. Another theory is that the device was actually named after a particular servant called Susan.
The use of the term probably came before it, but the first known appearance of the phrase “lazy susan” was in an advertisement in the magazine Vanity Fair in 1917. According to the advertisement, the $8.50 price was “an impossibly low wage for a good servant”. “Lazy Susan”, the ad went on to say was, “the cleverest waitress in the world”.
These days, many devices incorporate the mechanism of the lazy susan. Microwaves have them built in to ensure even cooking. Also, there are containers, tool mounts, spice racks, and pen holders are constructed with built-in lazy susan mechanisms. There is even a certain type of corner kitchen cabinet that utilizes a lazy susan device to save space.
Lazy susans are used in many facets of modern life. While not much is known for sure about the origins of the devices and how they came to be named, the information we have is intriguing. In any case, they are useful devices that we too easily take for granted.
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