One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw - Hardcover

Rybczynski, Witold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068486729X ISBN 13: 9780684867298

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

Synopsis

A fascinating history of one humankind's simplest but most essential tools traces the history of the screwdriver from a sketch in da Vinci's pad to a later patent and mass production. By the author of A Clearing in the Distance.

About this title

About the Author

Witold Rybczynski, born in Edinburgh, raised in Canada, and currently living in Philadelphia, is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written on architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of the critically acclaimed Home and the A Clearing in the Distance, a biography of frederick Law Olmsted, for which he was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He is the recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize.

Reviews

Acclaimed hardware, household and landscape writer Rybczynski invites readers to see how the world got screwedAand why it took so long, and how it felt. Romans had most of our hand tools, though cranks are medieval; screws and screwdrivers, however, originatedAwhen? Scottish crafts manuals from around the time of the American Revolution give screwdrivers as "turnscrews"; the same word in French, tournevis, turns up in 1723. Even earlier, screws appeared as a spinoff from Renaissance warfare, keeping the parts of a matchlock rifle linked. Used in timepieces and armaments, the screws of the 16th century were hand-cutAboth expensive and unreliable. Efficient, widespread screwing required (a) more uses, to up the demand; (b) steam power, aka the Industrial Revolution; and (c) smart mechanics and engineers, who invented the manufacturing procedures that Rybczynski describes. Canada's Peter L. Robertson came up with the wondrous socket-head (square-holed) screw; the inferior Phillips (+-holed) head came later, but became standard outside Canada. Siege engines, early firearms like the arquebus, 19th-century child labor, the precision lathe, door hinges and the great minds of ancient Greek geometry also figure among the threads of Rybczynski's tightly wound exposition. A professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, Rybczynski began this book after the New York Times asked him to pick the Tool of the Millennium. The short volume can feel like a bagatelle compared to Rybczynski's most ambitious projectsAhis biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, or the endeavor (chronicled in his Home) of building his own house plank by plank. Nevertheless, Rybczynski's many fansAand those who care for the history of hardwareAwill want to stick their heads in his new book: many will find themselves fastened to its story. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, has written best-selling books on such subjects as domestic comfort, building his own home and Frederick Law Olmsted. He felt a bit let down when the Sunday magazine of the New York Times asked him to write an article about "the best tool" of the second millennium. But he is good with tools and interested in them, and so he took on the assignment. Many tools, he soon found, predate the second millennium. Consulting William Louis Goodman's History of Woodworking Tools, published in 1964, he read somewhat disbelievingly that the screwdriver did not appear until the 19th century. That set him off on a search for earlier references to this "laughably simple tool." The result is this splendid account of a number of tools, of the evolution of the screw and finally of his discovery that the "turnscrew" is indeed much older than Goodman thought. His search led him eventually to the 15th-century Medieval Housebook, where he found a drawing of a screw-turning lathe with a puzzling tool resembling a chisel lying on a workbench. "One day, while I am puzzling over the drawing again, I realize that the blunt end [of the tool] is exactly the same size as the slot in the head of the cutter. Of course. It's not a chisel, it's used to adjust the cutter. It's a screwdriver. Eureka! I've found it. The first screwdriver."

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

As much as Frederick Law Olmstead, the hero of Rybczynski's acclaimed previous effort (A Clearing in the Distance, 1999), changed the face of America, the subject of his new study has changed the world.As the year 2000 approached, Rybczynski was asked to write a short essay on the "best tool" of the millennium for the New York Times Magazine. This assignment sent him off in search of a worthy topic: his first choices turned out to be much more ancient than he had expected, and, after considerable digging, he found himself writing about the screwdriver. Although the screw is much older, the tool with which we usually manipulate it seems to date back to the medieval period. Having ascertained this fact to his satisfaction, the author begins an ambling, rambling discussion of the evolution of this seemingly common household implement. Rybczynski digresses into some amusing and even fascinating sidings in the course of this journey. There is a wonderful mini-biography of Henry Chapman Mercer (a prominent historian of American tools who was also the avatar of the American wing of the Arts and Crafts Movement) and splendid thumbnail sketches of Peter L. Robertson and Henry F. Phillips (who competed to develop a screw and screwdriver that would be more reliable than the simple slotted screw-and, yes, Phillips is the man who gave his name to the cruciform screw and driver we all know). Perhaps the most striking chapter is devoted primarily to the story of Henry Maudslay, a British mechanical genius whose many innovations include the regulating screw and the screw-cutting lathe. At its heart, though, the central thesis is that men like Maudslay and Mercer possess the same kind of intuitive spark as great artists do-a thesis that this book convincingly illustrates.Charming, witty, and, despite its seemingly desultory structure, quite cunningly thought-out. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

What a delightful book! Who would have guessed that something as ordinary and useful as the screwdriver and the screw would also be so fascinating. When asked by the New York Times Magazine to write an essay on the best tool of the past thousand years, cultural historian Rybczynski (A Clearing in the Distance) struggled to find one, as most tools are far older, until he hit upon the screwdriver and the screw (although these instruments also may have mysterious origins that precede the millennium). In his trademark clear, elegant prose, Rybczynski traces the history of the screwdriver and screw from Hero's screw press and Archimedes' water screw to the 20th century's Phillips head. Home craftspeople, artists, history buffs, and engineers will delight in the story he tellsDhow such humble tools influenced society. Rybczynski points out that in the hands of mechanical geniuses like Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), the ability to fully exploit the screw led directly to precision tool making and the resulting enormous strides in building steam engines, railroads, bridges, etc. In writing this book, Rybczynski draws from art, literature, history, and engineering; readers will find themselves checking, as did Rybczynski, the details of illustrations and paintings for further clues. Highly recommended for all collections.
-DMichael D. Cramer, Raleigh, NC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Carpenter's Toolbox

This all starts with a telephone call from David Shipley, an editor at the New York Times. Would I write an article for a special millennium issue of the Sunday magazine? he asks. The end of the millennium is on many magazine editors' minds, and I have had a number of such requests. Shipley explains that the theme of the issue is The Best of the Millennium. That sounds interesting. "What do you want me to write about?" I ask.

"We're hoping that you can write a short essay about the best tool," he answers.

I am a bit let down. The best tool is hardly as weighty a subject as the best architect or the best city, topics I could really sink my teeth into. still, I have been working on a long biography and would welcome a break. Writing about the best tool of the millennium might even be fun.

While David Shipley is speaking, I compose the essay in my head. There is so much to choose from: paper clips, fountain pens, eyeglasses. I have recently seen a portrait in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of Benjamin Franklin wearing round spectacles, a reminder that Franklin was the inventor of the bifocal. Yet eyeglasses are much older than the eighteenth century. The first reference to eyeglasses is in a sermon given by a Dominican friar in Florence in 1306. He mentions that eyeglasses were invented twenty years earlier, and that he has even spoken with the inventor, although he neglects to give his name. Medieval eyeglasses were only for farsighted people and were used for reading and writing. They were the first practical application of the new science of optics, paving the way for such far-reaching inventions as the telescope and the microscope. A key influence on literacy, astronomy, and biology, eyeglasses surely qualify as "the best tool of the millennium." This is going to be easy.

However, when I mention my idea to David, it becomes clear that he has something else in mind. He means tool in the literal sense -- a handsaw or a hammer. So, not eyeglasses. He must hear the disappointment in my voice, and he points out that I once wrote a book about building my own house. That might make a good starting point, he suggests helpfully. All right, I say, I'll think about it.

In my case, "building my own house" meant actually building it. My wife and I, with the occasional help of friends, mixed concrete, sawed wood, plastered walls, and installed plumbing. We did everything ourselves except the electrical wiring. Ever since my boyhood experiences with recalcitrant train sets, I have been thwarted by electricity. Despite my father's patient explanations -- he was an electrical engineer -- and a college physics course, I never grasped the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance. Electricity, in fact, was a problem in our house-building project -- there was none. We were building on a rural site about eight hundred feet from the road, and although we planned to bring in power, initially we could not afford the cost of a temporary line. Renting a gas-powered generator would be expensive, too -- and noisy. I decided to build the framing and exterior of the house by hand. Once the basic structure was finished, which promised to take a year or two, we would bring in a line and hire a professional to install the electrical wiring.

Does one of my carpenter's tools qualify as the millennium's best? I discount power tools. I had used a portable circular saw, a drill, and a sander for finishing and cabinetwork, but these are chiefly loborsaving devices. Not that productivity isn't important. Ken Kern, the author of The Owner-Built Home, estimates that cutting all the two-by-fours for the frame of a small house would take seven full days using a handsaw, and only thirty minutes using a power saw. I appreciate the ease of cutting wood with power tools, but the result, while more quickly arrived at, is no different than if I use a handsaw. In any case, I enjoy working with my hands. One of the rewards of building something yourself -- a house or a bookshelf -- is the pleasure of using tools. Hand tools are true extensions of the human body, for they have evolved over centuries of trial and error. Power tools are more convenient, of course, but they lack precisely that sense of refinement. No doubt, if I spent my life hammering nails, I would feel differently about the, virtues of a nail gun, say. Yet increasing the productivity of carpenters does not seem to me in the same category as the invention of entirely new devices such as eyeglasses.

That leaves my box of hand tools. The tools required for the construction of a small wood-frame house fall roughly into four categories: measurement, cutting and shaping, hammering, and drilling. My measuring tools include a try square, a bevel, a chalk line, a plumb bob, a spirit level, and a tape measure. A little reading informs me that almost all these tools predate our millennium; indeed, most predate the first millennium of the Christian age. A Roman builder, or mensor aedificorum, was familiar with the try square, the plumb line, and the chalk line -- all tools that were developed by the ancient Egyptians. The level, or libella, also an Egyptian invention, consisted of a wood frame resembling the letter A, with a plumb bob suspended from the apex. To level, the string was lined up with a mark in the center of the crossbar. Not as compact as my spirit level, perhaps, but obviously just as serviceable since A-levels continued to be used until the mid-1800s. The spirit level, with its sealed tube containing an air bubble floating in alcohol, was invented in the mid-1600s. It was first exclusively a surveying instrument -- it took another two hundred years to find its way into the carpenter's toolbox. For measuring length, the Roman mensor used a regula, or a wooden stick divided into feet, palms, twelfths or unciae (whence our inches), and digiti or finger widths. I have a yardstick, too, but most of my measuring is done with a retractable steel tape. That, at least, would impress ray Roman counterpart, whose only compact measuring device was a one-foot bronze folding rule. Oak yardsticks were used in the Middle Ages, and folding rules, in ivory, brass, or boxwood, reappeared in the eighteenth century I can't find the origins of the tape measure, but I would guess that it was developed sometime in the late 1800s. I would be lost. without my twenty-five-foot retractable tape measure, but it does not seem to me to qualify as the best tool of the millennium.

I own several saws. The handsaw, too, is an ancient tool: archaeologists have found metal-toothead Egyptian saws dating back to 1500 B.C. They have broad blades, some as long as twenty inches, curved wooden handles, and irregular teeth. The blades are copper, a soft metal. To keep the blade from buckling, the Egyptian saw was pulled -- not pushed. Pulling is less effective than pushing, since the carpenter cannot bear down on the cutting stroke, and sawing wood must have been a slow and laborious process. The Romans made two important improvements. They used iron for the blades, which made them stiffer, and they set the teeth of the saw to project alternatively right and left, which had the effect of making the saw-cut -- or kerf -- slightly wider than the blade, allowing smooth movement.

The Romans also invented the stiffened backsaw, whose blade is reinforced at the top. This prevents straight-through cuts, but the tool is useful for cabinetwork, especially when used in combination with a miter box. The most ingenious Roman addition to cutting tools is the frame saw. A relatively inexpensive narrow blade is held in a wooden frame and is kept taut by tightening a cord. Wooden frame saws worked so well that they remained the most common type of saw

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068486729X
• ISBN 13: 9780684867298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 173