Did you know: Corkscrews Were Military Tools Back in the Days

Cokscrews were military tools to remove bullets back in the days. Oh, come on! What else could corkscrews have been used for? It’s right there in its name: It unscrews corks, and that’s that. Ever since people have had corks that need to be removed from wine bottles, they must’ve had corkscrews to do it. There are even pictures of old corkscrews you can find anywhere online.

There was a time when guns were, to put it bluntly, worth slightly less than their weight in manure. Bullets got stuck in muskets all the time, which was a problem because if your bullet got stuck it meant you were unable to fire until it was free, and someone was probably shooting back at you. The gun worm was developed to remove those stuck bullets and other blockages, and were therefore essential in stopping you from getting killed.

Now, how do corkscrews tie into all of this?

The answer is synchronicity. Cork bottle stoppers followed the traditional route of human invention, meaning people started using them before they really knew what they were doing. In this particular case, it meant corks were used to secure bottles before there actually was a product to remove them, thus forcing people to just leave the cork half hanging out so they could grip it with pliers or whatever.

Since that wasn’t a very secure way to close a bottle, it was just a matter of time before people started ramming their wine bottles too tightly shut. Corks were broken, and people were still hell bent on drinking their wine. Eventually, one such someone had enough military background to know how to operate the gun worm, and realized it seemed strangely suitable for removing corks. And since situations when soldiers needed their gun worms during a battle and noticed their family had “borrowed” them for removing corks probably made for some pretty awkward moments, by the 17th century a variety of gun worm that would become known as the corkscrew was manufactured specifically for that purpose.


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