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• Replaceable steel tips pick up tiny screws.

• Silicone tips resist cooking-level heat, but not molten-metal-level heat.

• Apparently if you grab a horse by the upper lip, it will calmly follow you around. These are commercially available horse lip grabbing pliers for that purpose. (If you don’t believe me, google “equine lip twitch”.) I don’t know anything about horses, but so far I have tried them on a dog and a girlfriend, and both of those experiences went badly.

• Tongs for grabbing stuck babies.

• These are called uterine tenaculum forceps. You can look that up if you really want to know.

• Tongs for picking up hot beakers or crucibles in an old lab—old enough that they were OK with asbestos sleaves. (The asbestos insulates the tongs and gives you cancer.)

• This is a fence wire puller. You put the wire between the two jaws, and then pull on the hooked end (with a winch or handle). Once the swinging jaw starts to grip, it squeezes harder the harder you pull on the hook.

• Obstetric Forceps

• Locking tongs like this are called hemostats.

• Long hemostats are useful not only in surgery.

• The oval ends on these mark them as surgical sponge forceps.

• These very long hemostats are sold in hardware stores, far from any operating room.

• Cupped ends make these suitable for picking up hot round things.

• Salad tongs, hinged in the middle.

• Ice Tongs

• Ice Tongs

• These have the same mechanism as ice tongs, but add a spring so there’s some gripping force even if you’re not pulling at all.

• Salad tongs, hinged at the end.

• Ice Tongs

• The cupped ends are for picking up tiny beads.

• Not really tweezers, but able to grab small things anyway.

• These old tongs were for kitchen or fireplace use.

• The design of these ice tongs makes the points squeeze tighter the more weight is hanging from them, like a Chinese finger trap. They were used to pick up heavy blocks of ice.

• Rubber Beaker Tongs

• This looks like it might also be for picking up beads, but instead it’s a nose hair trimmer. The ring and disk fit into each other, creating a sort of circular cutter that cuts, rather than pulls, the hairs.

• Tiny plastic tweezers for electronics assembly.

• Replaceable carbon fiber (plastic) tips pick up delicate electronic components.

• These rubber tips grip and protect.

• This half-tongs, half-spatula thing is meant for flipping fried eggs. I admit I haven’t tried it, but it’s hard to imagine this works well.

• Ice tongs need to be plastic or rubber coated to avoid melting the ice.

• Back yard tongs, for tuning things on a grill.

• Plain fireplace tongs.

• Modern automotive fuse puller.

• These tweezers have a ring to clamp them shut. They are for grabbing the end of an elastic band so you can thread it through the loop on a pair of pants or a sleeve.

• Small, basic, plain tweezers. Nothing to see here, move along.

• Snake catching tongs. (Seriously, that is what they are sold for.)

• These fireplace tongs are the most elaborately elegant tongs I have. They are for rearranging logs in a fire after you light it. (Before you light it your hands are a better form of gripping tool.)

• Tongs for picking up hot beakers or crucibles in a lab.

Do you have a better example of this kind of tool? Let me know by leaving a comment, and include a picture of it if you can so everyone can see!