If you ask Google who invented the spatula, you get an article I wrote a few years ago about a guy named John Spaduala. There’s even a snippet at the top of the screen with a photo of the guy and a little blurb from the article. (Some search strings now put my link at the top but give a snippet about a guy named Horace Spatula. It’s an ugly piece of revisionist history.) The facts of the article have been repeated all over the Internet, sometimes with attribution but usually without. A Turkish site even stole the whole article, translated it, and removed my Amazon affiliate link at the bottom. All of this is proof that the article is definitely true, and not something I just made up to see what would happen.
Click here to read the whole thing, which is full of very true facts like the ones in this excerpt:
The chef he worked under, Hans Krugar, was said to have been a savage man of cruel disposition and quick to anger. On one occasion, when Spaduala had failed to add a sufficient amount of beets to a stew, Krugar slammed his right hand under a heavy pot lid. Spaduala lost entirely the use of his pinky finger, and his middle and ring fingers were broken, healing in a palsied and deformed claw that for the remainder of his life he would attempt to hide in shame. When not in use, he would have his hand in his pocket.
Some credit the injury to his hand with giving John the inspiration for inventing the spatula, since it had been his dominant hand and now its use was severely limited, forcing him to find other methods of cooking things. The quote “Necessity is the mother of invention” is often attributed to Spaduala.