KNOXVILLE — Gene Wallace, 71, spent forty years working sheet metal, and it took him most of one winter to design the small machined key he now sells at the Fountain City farmers market. The key is a winder with a ratcheting clip that rolls a plastic toothpaste tube from the bottom and locks it rolled, recovering paste the tube was engineered to keep.
Wallace demonstrates it without enthusiasm.
“You didn’t need a tool for this. Nobody ever needed a tool for this,” he said, holding the key at arm’s length. “You rolled the old metal tubes up with your thumbs and that was the end of it. Now I’m out here machining ratchets so people can get at toothpaste they already paid for. Think about that.”
Wallace has campaigned since 2014 for the return of the all-aluminum toothpaste tube, which rolls flat and stays that way. The newer plastic laminate tubes won’t stay closed and allow paste to creep back down into the tube with each squeeze, making it difficult to extract all of the paste. His invention also fixes the plastic tube’s other habit. “You roll one of these plastic ones flat and set it down, and by morning it’s unrolled itself on the counter,” he said. “It fights you. A tube. So fine — the clip holds it down. I shouldn’t have had to think about any of this, is the part that gets me.”
He sells the key at cost, four dollars, and has machined a little over two hundred so far. He refuses to patent it. “A fella at the market keeps telling me to patent it, get it into stores,” he said. “Patent what? A fix for a thing that worked fine until they broke it? I don’t want to sell ten thousand of these. I want to quit making them.”
Regulars at the market call it the Wallace Key. Wallace calls it “the key” in person, but “the tool” on the instruction cards. His grandson briefly listed it online as the ThriftRoller Pro, an episode the family won’t talk about.
Wallace mails a prototype to Colgate-Palmolive each spring with a letter explaining that the key’s existence should embarrass them. The company thanked him for reaching out in each of their replies since 2014. He keeps the replies, along with the enclosed toothpaste coupons they provided, in a binder.
Customers report the key performs as promised, though several say Wallace grows quiet when complimented on it.
The key ships with a printed instruction card Wallace says should not have to exist. He keeps revising it, on the theory that if people are stuck needing one, the instructions ought to at least be right.