In the immortal battle of man vs. fly, the flies are winning — despite the eSwatter

Walking out of a hardware store last year with my new prized possession, an electric fly swatter, a woman stopped me in the parking lot to ask if it worked.

That’s the difference between men and women. A woman will want some assurance that a sketchy new gizmo works before making the purchase, while men will make the purchase for the very reason that it is a sketchy new gizmo.

At the very least, you have to believe that fly-swatter technology was due for an upgrade. Next year will mark the 125th anniversary of the fly swatter, patented by an inventor who (without the help of AI) designed a weapon with a whip-like action and striking surface that was heavily perforated to limit wind resistance.

This new fly swatter had enough rigidity to administer a fatal blow, yet enough resilience so  as not to smear fly entrails all over your new linen tablecloth.

Up until now, fly swatting had relied on three elements:

1. A fly.

2. A foreign object with which to attack the fly.

3. A solid object for the fly to land on with enough substance to allow the fly to be crushed by the foreign object (unlike, say, a shower curtain).

The eSwatter eliminates some of these variables because insect mortality is not dependent on the fly landing on anything. The eSwatter comes with a list of instructions that begins with “This Is Not a Toy.” No, this is a serious piece of advanced air-to-air combat artillery that, it must be said, sure looks like a toy.

It in fact resembles a small tennis racquet, with a similar grip attached to a rigid yellow plastic oval frame that surrounds a three-layer course of screening — one fine, electrified screen sandwiched in between two coarser, protective screens, because otherwise you know for a fact that even though This Is Not a Toy, every 10-year-old boy in America would be using it to zap his little brother.

Pressing a button on the handle on the grip causes a lamp to glow red and activates the electrified middle screen that is intended to fry the fly. But I only got it to work once, on a slow, sickly fly that was quite possibly already under hospice care.

First, as mentioned, traditional swatters depend on a stationary fly sitting on a solid object. By contrast, the eSwatter does not, cannot, work this way. It can only kill by contacting the fly in mid-air. And as it turns out, in 2 billion years of evolution, the common housefly has gotten really, really good at avoiding mid-air collisions.

This causes the increasingly frustrated user to swing more wildly and more forcefully in every direction imaginable, making up for the lack of quality in his aim with quantity. In other words, you’re basically flailing away with cartoon-like speed, hoping a fly hits the swatter by accident.

Which brings me to the second point: For the  reasons stated above, the eSwatter is worse than useless in smallish rooms. Unless you are in a dining room the size of Versailles, your final score is likely to be three lamps, two potted plants, six pieces of your wife’s prized Depression Ware collection and zero flies.

But the real flaw is the screening used to protect the person using the eSwatter from himself. While theoretically wide enough to allow a fly to pass through, this protective screening in practice protects the fly as well as the user. So even if you manage to connect, the chances are good the fly will simply bounce off the safety mesh instead of making it through to the electrified screen. Way to go, trial lawyers.

Although it occurs to me as I write this, I could improve my odds by taking a pair of wire cutters and snipping off the safety screens.

Somewhere in a hardware parking lot, a woman is covering her eyes.

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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: The eSwatter promises to zap pesky flies. But does it work?