Could anyone explain to me why forks have different amounts of prongs?
Forks have varying numbers, shapes and lengths of tines because they have varying purposes.
Fork you!
Good sites from Ringo. However, I didn’t see any mention of the common 3-tine vs 4-tine dinner fork.
Forks originated with 2 tines, merely to hold an item in place while cutting it. In time they began to be used to lift food to the mouth, and so the length of the tines shortened, and the number increased. Four-tine forks are more modern than their two and three-tine siblings, although fewer tines are better for stabbing thicker items, such as a roast or fruit. However, for simple place settings I could find no reason other than taste and style to pick a three-tine over a four-tine fork.
Here’s some insight from a Civil War reenactors’ site.
The data fork contains the basic information of the file, and the resource fork contains the type and creator so that when you double-click on it it knows which of your programs it should open in.
Don’t forget the close cousin, the Spork. http://www2.apex.net/users/sporkboy/sporks.html
May I ask a related question?
Why are forks curved the way they are? It seems to me that this is the worst design possible for keeping food on the back of the fork…
But a very good design for keeping food on the front of the fork.
IANAFE (I am not a flatware engineer), but I have a theory. Because forks are still frequently used for their original purpose, they retain design features important for that, even though these features sometimes interfere with the fork’s more recent function. When cutting something, you want maximum clearance of your hand away from the knife. If the fork were completely flat, your hand would be closer to the action. This would increase risk to your hand, decrease your visibility, and cause you to use a flatter angle in order to get the hand out of the way. That would decrease some of the normal force on the steak, and increase the lateral force, potentially overcomming the starting friction and sending your steak onto Aunt Bea’s new white tablecloth.
A second point is that the curved neck on shorter forks is sometimes used as a point of bracing when holding the fork, which keeps the hand from sliding down the handle. This is not an issue on foot-long carving forks, which may explain why they are curved less at the neck.
It also may be that forks are curved not to help Europeans balance their peas on the back, but to help Americans shovel in their chow on the front.
May the Fork be with you.
Another possible reason for the fork being curved is the way they are used in most European countries. If you hold the fork in your left hand and point the tines downward it works much better if the tines are curved. This is also the reason the fork is on the left side of the plate.
If you’ve ever dined at the appropriate greasy spoon and gotten a flattened fork, you’ll appreciate the maneuverability some curvature allows.
Dammit, ChinaGuy, you beat me to it.
Sporks are the eating utensil of the future!!! Even if they are impossible to use.
www.spork.org or www.spork.net
I don’t remember which one it is, sorry.
www.spork.org !!!
Thank you for understanding.
I thought 3-tine models were called “threeks”.
For a detailed discussion, get a copy of Henry Petroski’s “The Evolution of Useful Things.” Forks have been all over the place in terms of shape, number/size/orientation of tines, and even things like having one tine be a knife blade.
I’ve just found, to my amazement, that these may be referred to as ice cream forks or cake/ice cream forks. Sorry for the late posting, but I’ve just received the book I bought as a result of this thread, Sterling Silver Flatware for Dining Elegance by Richard Osterberg, 1994, ISBN 0-88740-630-0.
Does this mean that there are elegant sterling silver sporks available?
Sweet! I want some!
Get a fork… beat it flat with a hammer… Try it out.
The difference will surprise you.
I don’t know about sterling silver, but I DID find a titanium spork on the web for a friend of mine. It was his winterfest present last year. He is very fond of sporks, and lamented that he couldn’t find one in anything but plastic. Apparently, this item ( http://www.backcountrystore.com/snowpeaktitaniumspork.htm ) is JUST what backpackers want, a very lightweight double duty utensil. I’d sort of like to have a set of sporks, but there’s no way I’m buying a set at nine bucks each.:eek:
Well, the resource fork also contains the various windows, dialog boxes, and icons used by your program. The idea being that if you wanted to internationalize it for another country, you only had to update the resources without recompiling the code itself.
Before Apple switched from the 680x0 processors to the PowerPC line, the resource fork also contained the executable itself, in a resource called “CODE”, and the data fork was only used to store inforamtion-type data. The PowerPC transition put the PowerPC executable code in the Data fork for backwards compatability – these “fat binary” programs could run on either the PowerPC or the 680x0 computers because they had the code for both.
Of course, with MacOS X these days, data forks and resource forks are being phased out in favor of “bundles”, but that’s Yet Another Hijack – and this message already has too many of those… 