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

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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The Best Tool of the Millennium
The seeds of Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying "the best tool of the millennium." The award-winning author of Home, A Clearing in the Distance, and Now I Sit Me Down, Rybczynski once built a house using only hand tools. His intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- serves him beautifully on his quest.

One Good Turn is a story starring Archimedes, who invented the water screw and introduced the helix, and Leonardo, who sketched a machine for carving wood screws. It is a story of mechanical discovery and genius that takes readers from ancient Greece to car design in the age of American industry. Rybczynski writes an ode to the screw, without which there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no enlightenment science. One of our finest cultural and architectural historians, Rybczynski renders a graceful, original, and engaging portrait of the tool that changed the course of civilization.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateJul 23, 2013
ISBN9780743219082
One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw
Author

Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate. Among his award-winning books are Home, The Most Beautiful House in the World, and A Clearing in the Distance, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is the emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. How Architecture Works is his eighteenth book.

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Rating: 3.6265059036144582 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Rybczynski, is a writer of some talent, and when asked to define "The Tool of the Millenium" he chose the variant of the inclined plane and it's application tool the screw and the screwdriver. When finally pushed to define the best screw he chose the Robertson pattern. It is also my favourite, but it does require a specialist screwdriver. Still I use a lot of them around the house, and you only need three drivers to cover all the different screw sizes. The book is surprisingly interesting and may be a good present for the technologist in your circle.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a bit like being cornered by a uncle at a party. The kind of uncle that is charming and erudite but not very good at listening, so you have to hear all the details that you're not interested in as well as the good bits. The good bits are definitely there, but I'm not sure they're worth it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm not quite sure where this book came from. I reached into a box while unpacking, looked down and though "Now why would I ever have this?" I still don't know, it's one of the few mystery books that have shown up over the years. It is a short book, less than 150 pages, with several well drawn diagrams and even a picture glossary of tools to refer to as you read. I was surpisingly drawn into it, considering its about tools, and I don't have much of a fit-it-up bone in my body. I'm more of the tear it down and look pleadingly at my boyfried to put it back together type.The author starts by giving us a reason why he felt compelled to research the screw and screwdriver of all things. He then walks us through a good chunk of his research as he looks for the origins (which was suprisingly tricky). Finally, he walks us backwards through time through all the various stages and uses of the screw(driver). I would have prefered to start at the beginning and work our way to modern times, so it was a bit confusing for me jumping backwards but I can understand why he wrote that way. An interesting book to keep mmy occupied for an afternoon...lovely sketches throughout as well.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Essay on the origins and development of the screw and hence the screwdriver. Wonderful details and an accidental case study on the unintentional consequence. Better screws led to better lathes which lead to factories long before the cotton factory.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It is hard to fill 140 pages with a history and evolution of screws and the screwdriver. The screw appears late in the Middle Ages but in nearly perfect form. The only changes are a switch to machine production during the industrial revolution and the variation at its point (pointed instead of flat) and head of a screw (Phillips instead of Robertson). One feels the text's origin as a magazin article. The result languishes between an expanded magazin article and a full book treatment. Rybczynski should have fleshed out the sketches of Archimedes and the pioneers of the screwdriver industry Jesse Ramsden, Henry Maudslay, Peter L. Robertson, Henry F. Phillips. Some numbers about the current world-wide production and use of screws might have been interesting. What is the quantitative relationship between nails and screws? What is the impact of the recent trend to glue things together on the screw industry?Instead, we follow Rybczynski in his heuristic and trivia filled discovery of the history of the screw. He start with the OED whose earliest mention of the English term happens not to be actually the first one. Rybczynski finds earlier quotes (I wonder if the OED has corrected this in the mean time.). Switching to French, he discovers even earlier mentions of the tourne-vis. This seems to satisfy him, although I immediately thought about Renaissance Italy. Rybczynski eventually arrives there too, after a roundabout via German armor, firearms and Dürer etchings. Overall, there is good pictorial and text support for screws and screwdrivers around the middle of the 15th century. The inventor of the first screw will forever remain in the clouds.Rybczynski also shows that the use of large-scale screws to in presses and water management was well established since Archimedes and even dating back to Babylon. Small screws were too laborious to make (as the grooves had to be manually filed) to be practical. Although this argument does not hold in case of buttons which were also invented only in the middle ages. Clasps and wooden joints seem to have fulfilled their needs. The screw's breakthrough only came with the widespread use of precision machines (firearms, clocks, ...). Rybczynski only glimpses at the Canadian, British and American screw pioneer inventors in a few pages. These lesser known mechanical genies deserved fuller treatments. A look at non-English inventors is missing too.Overall, a quick, diverting read about an uncommon topic that leaves a curious reader stranded midway in an interesting story. Well, if you want an exhaustive treatment of the subject by Rybczynski, you're screwed.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Alright, but rambling and not all that interesting. Also, the end seems to come awfully abruptly ... But the topic is a worthy one, and if you like this sort of book, go for it.

Book preview

One Good Turn - Witold Rybczynski

CONTENTS

Epigraph

Chapter One: The Carpenter’s Toolbox

Chapter Two: Turnscrews

Chapter Three: Lock, Stock, and Barrel

Chapter Four: The Biggest Little Invention

Chapter Five: Delicate Adjustments

Chapter Six: Mechanical Bent

Chapter Seven: Father of the Screw

GLOSSARY OF TOOLS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

NOTES

TEXT ILLUSTRATION SOURCES

INDEX

to Shirley

Heurēka! [I’ve found it!]

—ARCHIMEDES

CHAPTER ONE

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.¹ 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 laborsaving 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.² 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.³ 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 my 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-toothed 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.I 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 well into the nineteenth century (the principle of the frame saw survives in the modern hacksaw). In the mid–seventeenth century, a new type of saw was introduced in Holland and England. It had a broad, unstayed blade and a wooden pistol-grip handle. The rigid blade, originally made by rolling steel strips, makes a more accurate cut than a frame saw, and there is no frame to interfere with deep cuts. This effective tool became the basic modern handsaw. My workhorse is a twenty-six-inch Disston crosscut handsaw, with a skew-back blade, first introduced in 1874 by Henry Disston, a Philadelphia saw-maker. The open handsaw is a definite contender for best tool, but while

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