One night in the mid-1860s, Edward Campbell Simmons, a junior partner at Waters, Simmons and Company, a St. Louis hardware wholesaler, went to bed agitated. He had just had a sales call with the manufacturer of the wildly popular Lippincott axe, whose thin blade worked best on soft woods—the manufacturer had refused to reduce Simmons’ price to a competitive rate. Simmons woke up with a start and, in the middle of the night, began to whittle a...Continue Reading