Flytraps and Fly Screens

Woven wire screening was manufactured as early as the 1830s in the United States, in Connecticut, and was used to screen the sides and doors of food safes and to make sieves. Cheesecloth was used to cover serving dishes on the table until woven wire dish covers—round and oval domes of screening with metal rims, in many sizes—became available in the 1850s. In the early twenty-first century similar covers of flexible cloth are marketed for outdoor dining. After the 1890s window screens became fairly common, but most houses were not screened until the late 1920s. Window screens reduced the need to protect containers and dishes from flies. Other nineteenth-century tools in the battle against fly-borne diseases were flyswatters; wind-up fly fans with long-reaching gauzy wings, which were set on dining or worktables; baited flytraps of glass or wire mesh with funneled openings from which flies could not escape; and sticky coils of paper.