Joshua Pusey and the Paper Matchbook

Near this spot in the eighteen eighties and nineties, a Philadelphia attorney named Joshua Pusey lived on his estate called Maple Linden. In eighteen ninety-two, Pusey received a United States patent for an invention that would end up in virtually every American pocket and purse: the paper matchbook. Four years later he sold that patent to the Diamond Match Company, and within a few years millions of matchbooks were rolling off the presses annually.

Pusey was a Civil War veteran and a descendant of an old Quaker family, and he earned nearly forty patents over the course of his life. His name is largely forgotten today, but the humble paper matchbook he invented became one of the most mass-produced objects of the twentieth century.