What is an Ah-So?

Karen, I recently saw an oddly shaped corkscrew.  It had a handle and two prongs but no worm to drill through the cork.  What is this thing and how could it possibly get a cork out?

You saw an Ah-So.  The  corkscrew has no worm, but rather two flat metal blades that are inserted in the neck of the bottle so that they hug the sides of the cork.  By gently twisting, pulling, and rocking the corkscrew back and forth, the cork is extracted.   Originally named the Magic Cork Extractor, the Ah-So was patented in 1879.  In England, the cork puller was nicknamed “the butler's friend” because it allowed an unhappy butler to remove a cork, sample some of his master's best, replace that with inferior wine, and then recork the bottle with no telltale hole as evidence.  The current moniker for the corkscrew--Ah So--has been used since the 1960s, but I know of no source for the derivation of that name.

— Karen

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