Sir Edward Thomason (1769-1849), self-made industrialist and inventor, was one of the leading manufacturers in the Birmingham of his day. His father was a bucklemaker and as a youth Thomason was apprenticed to Matthew Boulton. In 1793 he was in business on his own account making buttons, but soon had expanded to include medals and gold- and silverware. An inveterate self-promoter, he left a two-volume autobiography of such boastfulness that it rivals Gilbert Scott's memoirs in its pomposity. His manufactory in Church Street, Birmingham, was famous for the four bronze horses, copied from those of St. Mark's, Venice, high atop the roof. In 1816 he executed a life-size replica of the Warwick Vase, a casting of which stands in front of the Senate House, Cambridge. He was knighted in 1832.

Regarding the Thomason corkscrew, it is perhaps best to let Thomason speak for himself:

"I now turned my attention to the improvement of the corkscrew. At this period, 1801, it was a kind of fashion for persons to draw the corks of the wine even at their own table, and which not only required some strength and skill, but was sometimes attended by accident, by the breaking of the neck of the bottle, and, furthermore, it was next to an impossibility to take the cork from the worm without spoiling the fingers. To avert these two inconveniences, I directed my improvements, and I produced a combination of the three screws working together, and following each other, so that, on piercing the cork with the point of the worm, and continuing to turn the handle the contrary way, the cork was discharged and fell into the finger glass." (Memoirs, 1845)