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Did "Earl Mitt" even exist at all? I first heard this story from an answer to this English Language and Usage Stack Exchange question about oven mitts/oven gloves.

Earlier today, the story was in Wikipedia, but it has since been removed; perhaps by someone else who saw the answer I linked to and who was also suspicious of it. Here is the earlier version of the Wikipedia article "Oven Glove", which said:

Oven gloves were invented by Earl Mitt of Austin, Texas, in the early 1870s. He was a frequent baker of Gugelhupf cakes and permanently disfigured his left hand in a baking accident. To prevent further injury to himself, and the injuries of the many generations to come, he crafted a rudimentary oven "mitt" made of wool and shoe leather. He slowly refined his design over the years, experimenting with various arrangements of finger compartments and different insulating materials.

There are also lots of other sites where this claim is repeated (some of them probably learned this bit of fun trivia from Wikipedia), some with minor details changed. Here are some examples: [1], [2], [3].

The story really smells fishy to me (like a less amusing version of the story that the word "crap" comes from Thomas Crapper's name), but I haven't found evidence to disprove it yet.

The first thing I tried to do was find an example of the phrase "oven mitt" being used (with its modern meaning) before the 1870s, the purported date of invention. I tried searching Google Books for the word "oven mitt," but I didn't find anything from before the 1870s. The Google Books Ngram Viewer records no uses of "oven mitt" before 1940.

The word "mitt" by itself, meaning basically "glove," has been attested for longer (as Nate Eldredge states in the comments). However, this doesn't by itself show that "Earl Mitt" did not invent the term and concept of the "oven mitt" in particular; for example, see the following comment from ELU:

Oh, I wouldn't doubt that there was some double meaning intended, but the fact that the inventor's name is Earl Mitt is most definitely a factor in the naming.

So, I haven't found evidence that the name "oven mitt" predates the purported inventor; but other people may have access to other resources, or be able to think of better methods of refuting (or possibly, confirming!) this story. Can you help me learn the truth about this?

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paradisi
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    The OED's first citation for *mitt* as something to wear on the hand is dated 1757, and the sense of "mitten" goes to 1812. So if Earl Mitt did name the oven mitt after himself, it was a coincidence that his name was already in use as the word for such objects. – Nate Eldredge Oct 01 '15 at 22:53
  • @NateEldredge: right. The word "mitt" definitely existed beforehand. But it's possible (though improbable IMO) that the two-word phrase "oven mitt," if "Earl Mitt" was actually its inventor, was influenced by his name. – paradisi Oct 01 '15 at 22:55
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    I edited the article to remove the origin section after seeing the ELU question. Made no sense to me and it had been unreferenced since 2013. There's a thread with more details on the talk page, feel free to drop in. – isanae Oct 01 '15 at 22:57
  • The [IfYouCanRead link](http://www.ifyoucanread.com/2013/10/o-oven-mitt/) (your link 1) definitely acknowledges that the word *mitt* already existed, and implies that the inventor's name was merely coincidence. – Andrew Leach Oct 02 '15 at 08:40
  • There's another (very weak, [only 1](http://www.tradeindia.com/fp1601662/Asbestos-Gloves.html)) claim that he invented "asbestos glove" instead, but for the same purpose with almost the same text as from Wikipedia... though it might be used only for marketing purpose (the link refers to a trader site). **Disclaimer:** I'm not affiliated with that website/trader at all, just for the sake of researching Earl Mitt and glove. – Andrew T. Oct 02 '15 at 09:36
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    I'm very dubious of this claim. Aside from the apparent lack of references to this Earl Mitt, gloves have been around for centuries - is it really likely that it wasn't until the 1870s that someone thought of using a thick leather glove to pick up something hot? Now if the claim was that Earl Mitt was the first to start *marketing* a glove for this purpose it would sound more plausible to me. – Eborbob Oct 02 '15 at 10:56
  • Didn't Blacksmiths use similar sorts of gloves to handle hot metal? It's very hard to believe that this didn't exist before 1870. – Luke Oct 02 '15 at 15:52
  • I found a [competing claim](http://www.hatley.com/en_us/blog/2012/03/history-of-the-oven-mitt/) that the oven mitt was invented by Francis Mitts of Jersey City in 1884. But the source also claims the story is false. – Flimzy Oct 10 '15 at 21:06
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    The oldest document Google knows about with the name Earl Mitt contains slightly different version of your quote, from [May 14, 2013](https://safetyequipments.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/asbestos-gloves-supplier-trader-in-ahmedabad-gujarat-india/). – Flimzy Oct 10 '15 at 21:10
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    There is also [a US Patent](http://www.google.com/patents/US2391263) for a "Baker's Safety Glove" dated 1944, and an earlier patent for a [5-fingered version](http://www.google.com/patents/US2251027) in 1939. There also aren't any patents by an Earl Mitt at all, and only [a couple of mitten-related patents](https://www.google.com/search?q=Mitt&biw=1455&bih=656&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Cptsdt%3Aa%2Ccd_min%3A1870%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1880&tbm=pts) by anyone in the 1870s, and they don't relate to baking or heat protection. – Flimzy Oct 10 '15 at 21:36
  • @AndrewT. Asbestos was known about 4.500 years ago. Charlemagne (around 800 AD) is supposed to have had a table cloth made of asbestos that he could throw into fire without it burning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos – Bent Sep 30 '16 at 21:51
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    @Flimzy https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oven_glove&oldid=554090738 this version was slightly earlier – DavePhD Oct 18 '16 at 11:07

1 Answers1

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I found some evidence (all of which points very strongly against any "Earl Mitt") and assembled a timeline:

  • 1757: Mitt (a clipping of "mitten" with the same meaning) is first attested in a letter by W. Provoost in Beekman Mercantile Papers (OED).
  • 1923: A "baking glove" is patented: "My invention relates to a glove for protecting a person's hand when cooking, baking or handling hot dishes." While patent searches are not my area of expertise, I could not find anything earlier, not even when looking through Google's list of related patents. This was also the first instance of "baking glove" I could find.
  • 1937: I found "oven glove" in Report by the Council for Art and Industry. (OED has oven glove from 1942 in the Times (London)*.)
  • 1942: I found "oven mitt" in Business Promotion. (OED has oven mitt from 1946 in the New York Times*.)
  • Never: There's not a single result for "earl mitt" in Google Books or Elephind (except for a couple OCR errors — so few you can check all of them yourself).

* Both of these dates are from their "oven" entry, which was last updated in 2004. This means they had some good tools for this type of research, but not what we have nearly 20 years later thanks to larger archives and better OCR. Therefore, it's not surprising that slightly earlier examples can be found, though with Google Books you do have to double and triple check the date since that's computer generated. (This is my area of expertise.)

Laurel
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