History of the Screw
FEATURE
Screw-cutting lathe from The Medieval Housebook of Wolfegg Castle, c. 1475-90
Editors Note: The following is a book review from the Fastener History section of GlobalFastenerNews.com. Click on Fastener History for hundreds of industry stories from the past. More articles are posted each week.
November 10, 2000 FIN – The New York Times asked author Witold Rybczynski to write an essay on “the best tool of the millennium.”
Rybczynski was less than thrilled with the freelance opportunity. “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,” he recalled.
But he wanted a break from the biography he was writing and started thinking. He and his wife, Shirley, had built a house with their own hands and they knew tools.
Rybczynski discounted power tools. Though he acknowledged that cutting all the two-by-fours for the frame of a small house would take seven days with a handsaw and only 30 minutes with a power saw, Rybczynski reasoned that hand tools “are true extensions of the human body, for they have evolved over the centuries of trial and error. Power tools are more convenient, of course, but they lack precisely that sense of refinement.”
He then considered the hammer, handsaw, drills and the box plane. He almost settled on the “boring” carpenter’s brace.
When he mentioned his indecision to Shirley, she responded without hesitation. “There is one tool that I’ve always had at home. A screwdriver,” she pointed out. “You always need a screwdriver for something.”
Searching a thousand years of history for mentions of the earliest screwdriver proved difficult. So tough that the subject became a book, One Good Turn – A Natural driver & the Screw.
Rybczynski started with William Louis Goodman’s History of Woodworking Tools and found nothing about the screwdriver until the 1800 to 1962 period. The 1949 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica only offers a definition – no history – of the screwdriver.
The first appearance in print that Rybczynski found was in the 1812 book Mechanical Exercises. Screwdriver is defined simply as “a tool used to turn screws into their places.” There is no illustration and no other mention in the book.
Some earlier references were not what we know as screwdrivers. The Greek word translated as screwdrivers really means “bow drills.”
There were disappointments along the way. “I am disappointed that the oldest screwdriver resembles the kind of gimcrack household gadget that is sold by Hammacher Schlemmer,” he said of a 16th century photograph.
Rybczynski found an unlabeled screwdriver in the gunsmith’s shop of the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, PA.
A catalogue by English toolmakers in Sheffield indicates there was enough demand for screwdrivers by the early 1800s to warrant factory production.
For more, read “Author’s Search for The Father of the Screw” in Fastener History. ©2011 GlobalFastenerNews.com
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