One Good Turn
A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw
Witold Rybczynski
The author begins the book by telling us that it all started with a telephone call from an editor of the New York Times asking if he would write an article for a special millennium issue of the Sunday Magazine. In exploring just what kind of article was wanted, it appeared that something along the lines of the “best tool” of the millennium was what the editor was seeking. After all, the author and his wife had built their own house except for the wiring. Didn’t that give him any ideas? In the long run it was his wife who finally made the choice–the screwdriver. Everywhere they had lived she always kept a screwdriver in a handy kitchen drawer.
Rybczynski begins his search for the history of the screwdriver with the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells him that the earliest reference to such a tool is in a book published in 1812 and titled Mechanical Exercises by a Peter Nicholson. From there he begins examining medieval books. A book by Albrecht Durer occasionally shows tools—a woodcut of the Holy Family in Egypt shows Joseph using an adz—but no screwdriver. A famous engraving Melancolia I shows metal dividers, an open handsaw, iron pincers, a rule, a template, a claw hammer, and four iron nails. But no screwdriver. The most famous technological treatise of the sixteenth century was Agostino Ramelli’s Le Divese et Aniificiose Machine (Various and Ingenious Machines), which was published in Paris in 1588. The book does not show screwdrivers, but the iron legs of the hand–cranked flour mill are attached to a wooden base with slotted screws, one of which is shown partially unscrewed to reveal the threads. This is cited as proof that screws—and presumably screwdrivers—were used more than one hundred years before any of his previous sources had suggested. The author is slowly led to ancient firearms and to matchlock firearms in particular, in which the mechanism is fastened to the stock by slotted–head screws. This he finds in a manuscript dated 1475. Later, he finds screws in jousting armor of about the same period.
Ancient screws were complicated to make and therefore were expensive. A blank was forged, pointed, and headed. Then a slot was cut in the head using a hacksaw, and then the threads were laboriously filed by hand. From here the author traces the development of lathes that would allow screws to be mass produced and adjusting screws to be made with great accuracy. Throughout the book Rybczynski adds interesting side stories including a description of jousting and why screws are important in certain parts of the armor, and ends the book with a very instructive chapter on Archimedes.