A Short History of Scissors

Pick up your fabric shears and you are holding a tool with more than three thousand years of history in it. The scissors on your cutting table have outlived empires, survived a design change or two, and picked up some strange superstitions along the way. Here is the story, from Bronze Age springs to those famous orange handles.

Scissors In The Ancient World

The earliest scissors were not the cross bladed kind you use today. They were spring scissors: two bronze blades joined at the handle end by a thin, C shaped strip of springy metal. You squeezed the blades together to cut, and the spring pushed them back open. Encyclopaedia Britannica dates spring scissors to the Bronze Age, and the oldest examples we know of are usually placed in Mesopotamia three to four thousand years ago. Egyptian bronze spring scissors, dated to around 1500 BC, were large, heavy duty affairs, closer to shears than to embroidery scissors.

Bronze was the metal of choice because it was strong, durable, and could take a working edge. Iron and steel only displaced it after the 500s and 600s CE, when the better cutting edge won out.

Rome Invents The Scissors You Know

Pivoted scissors, two blades crossing on a central pin, appeared in ancient Rome around AD 100, and were also used in China, Japan and Korea. The Romans were among the first to use scissors for hairstyling rather than just farm work. The old spring design did not vanish, though; Roman iron spring shears have been dug up in London, and Roman surgeons used bronze shears as operating instruments.

The showpiece of the era sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a pair of bronze shears, perhaps 2nd century AD, from Trabzon in modern Turkey, inlaid with silver and black copper. Whoever made them had a sense of humor. When the blades close, the decoration brings a cat face to face with a dog on one side and a lion on the other.

Guilds, Blades And A Very Long Middle Age

Spring shears stayed the everyday cutting tool of Europe right through the Middle Ages; pivoted scissors only became common household objects from the 16th century onward. The English word scissors arrived in the late 14th century, from the Old French cisoires, meaning shears. And because scissors is grammatically plural, we have been saying a pair of scissors ever since.

Scissor making grew up as a guild craft in the great cutlery towns. Solingen in Germany, the City of Blades, has made scissors since medieval times and counted over 300 scissorsmiths by the end of the 18th century. In Solsona, Spain, workshops organised under the Guild of Saint Eligius, patron saint of knife makers. In Hangzhou, China, the Zhang Xiaoquan company has been making scissors continuously since 1663, and today turns out an estimated seven million pairs a year.

One place the Bronze Age design never died: sheep shears. Modern blade shears are still built exactly like ancient spring scissors, and around half a million sheep a year are still shorn with them in the Canterbury high country of New Zealand, because blade shears leave a protective layer of wool on the sheep. Your own thread snips work on the same squeeze and spring principle. Every time you snip a thread, you are using the oldest scissor design there is.

Sheffield And The Birth Of Modern Scissors

Pivoted scissors were not manufactured in large numbers until 1761, when Robert Hinchliffe of Sheffield produced the first modern scissors in hardened, polished cast steel. His hardest problem was the finger rings: he made them solid, drilled a hole, then filed away metal until a finger fit through. By the 19th century Sheffield had an estimated 60 steel scissor companies, hand forging elaborately ornamented scissors before styles simplified for mechanical production.

The craft has narrowed since. By 2021 just two scissor makers remained in Sheffield, William Whiteley (founded 1760) and Ernest Wright (established 1902), and between them no more than ten master putter togetherers, the craftspeople trained to assemble a pair of traditional Sheffield scissors. Meanwhile the vast majority of the world’s scissors now come from China, which accounted for 64.3 percent of global scissors exports as of 2019.

One Whiteley invention matters to you directly. In 1875 the firm incorporated Thomas Wilkinson and Son, scissors makers to Queen Victoria, whose patented sidebent design put a crank in the handles so the lower blade runs flat along the cutting table. Every pair of dressmaking shears sold today is built on that blueprint.

The Makers In Your Sewing Room

Fiskars is older than you think: founded in 1649, when Dutch merchant Peter Thorwoste was granted a charter by Queen Christina of Sweden to build a forge in the Finnish village of Fiskars. It is the oldest privately owned company in Finland. The famous orange arrived in 1967 with the world’s first plastic handled scissors; prototypes were made in black, red, green and orange, and orange won an internal company vote. Fiskars Orange is now a registered trademark, and the orange handled scissors have been made in the USA since 1978.

Gingher, founded in 1947 in North Carolina, built its name on hot drop forged shears, and a pair of Gingher knife edge dressmaker shears remains a rite of passage purchase for American sewists. Fiskars acquired the company in 2005. Kai was founded in 1908 in Seki City, Japan, a town forging blades for 800 years; its smiths turned from swords to scissors when the sword era ended, and Kai scissors have been imported to the US since the mid 1990s. Western style sewing scissors first reached Japan in 1854 with Commodore Perry.

Pinking Shears: Invented By Women

Before pinking shears, sewists cut decorative zigzag edges with a pinking iron and a mallet. In 1874 Eliza P. Welch patented an improved pinking iron, and on 3 January 1893 Louise Austin patented the pinking shears design that became the standard. Two women bookend the invention of the pinked edge. The zigzag cut does not stop fraying entirely; it limits how far each thread can fray, which is why a pinked seam allowance survives the wash. The name may come from the garden pink, the Dianthus flower with naturally serrated petals.

And a word for left handed sewists, who have been quietly cheated for centuries: most scissors sold as ambidextrous merely reverse the finger grips while keeping right handed blades, which hides the cutting line from a left hander’s view. True left handed scissors mirror both the grips and the blade stacking. If you are a leftie, that distinction is worth every penny.

Why You Should Never Gift Scissors (Without A Coin)

Across many cultures, giving scissors or any sharp object as a gift is believed to cut the bond between giver and receiver. The traditional fix: the recipient hands back a small coin, turning the gift into a symbolic purchase so nothing is severed. The custom spans Chinese, Scottish and North American family traditions, retailers still tape a penny to gift scissors, and it is exactly why your grandmother demanded a nickel before she handed over her good shears.

Conclusion

One more myth to retire: Leonardo da Vinci did not invent scissors. They predate him by well over two thousand years. The next time you cut into fresh yardage, you are wielding Rome’s pivot, Sheffield’s steel, Wilkinson’s sidebent handles and possibly Finland’s orange plastic, all in one motion.

If all this history has you looking sideways at your own shears, we have you covered: our honest budget or quality sewing scissors review, a guide to the 7 types of scissors every sewist meets, how to sharpen your scissors at home, and some lovely free scissors pouch patterns to keep them safe.