The humble rake: pig-demon weapon, lucky charm, and slapstick's favourite trap
In Journey to the West, the pig-faced pilgrim Zhu Bajie fights with a nine-toothed rake. Japanese markets sell decorated rakes each November to scoop in good fortune. Russians warn against stepping on the same rake twice. Few tools have wandered as far from the garden as this one.
The name comes from an Old English word, raca, rooted in the idea of scraping things into a heap, and the German Rechen shares the ancestry. At heart a rake is an outdoor broom: a crossbar of teeth on a long handle, usually about 1.5 metres, used to gather leaves and hay, loosen soil, level beds and drag dead grass out of lawns. Wooden rakes from China date back to around 1100 BC.
Modern history is a string of patents. Edmund Brown patented a garden rake in 1874 that he described as a self-clearing attachment for iron-toothed yard rakes. In 1905 Richard Franklin Lawson tried crossing a rake with a snow shovel. Camille J. Rocquin's metal design of 1929 had prongs much like today's, and plastic versions arrived in the 1970s. Plastic is light, cheap and can be made wide for fresh autumn leaves; steel tines dig better into the wet, matted debris of spring.
Shapes multiply with the job. Leaf rakes fan out springy L-shaped teeth that follow the ground without tearing plants. Bow rakes have a curved link to the handle so the flat back can level soil. Landscaping rakes may span 38 inches or more. Thatch rakes carry blades on both sides, one to slice the matted layer between grass and soil and one to pull it out; that layer, once it reaches about a quarter inch, blocks air and light and invites disease. There are also rakes for concrete, rooftop snow, wildfire breaks and even picking berries.
The comic potential is well known. Step on the teeth of one lying face up and the handle swings into your face, a gag milked by the Pink Panther films, Tom and Jerry and a Simpsons episode in which Sideshow Bob meets rake after rake. In Russian slang the word for rakes simply means trouble.
Source: Rake (tool)
