Of screws and screwdrivers - history - Abstract

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2000 by Alfred Mayor

When asked by the New York Times to write about the best tool invented in the past millennium, Witold Rybczynski was forced to reject an astonishing number of candidates, all invented before the year one A.D. Among them are the try square, plumb bob, measuring stick, handsaw, plane, chisel, and bow drill. Having built his own house from the ground up without benefit of electric tools, the author could simply tap his toolbox for ideas but, in the end, it was his wife who made the fruitful suggestion of the screwdriver.

So begins this detective story tracing the history of the screwdriver back from the first source he consults, which claims it is a nineteenth-century invention. Even the Oxford English Dictionary cites 1812 as the first instance of the word in print Gradually, the road leads back to the mention of a turnscrew, the word for a screwdriver in the Midlands and North of England. Since this is a literal translation of tournevis, the French for screwdriver, the author consults Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, where he finds several screwdrivers. We are now back to 1765, and shortly to 1723, the date of the first known mention of tournevis.

The author then takes the first of a number of ruminative breathers, speculating on the button. The Romans used buttons only as ornaments and even the ancient Chinese never progressed beyond the toggle and loop. Unlike the handsaw, which was refined over time, the button and its buttonhole simply appeared in northern Europe in the thirteenth century--true works of an anonymous inventive genius. Then we proceed to an influential treatise on ingenious machines published in 1588 by Agostino Ramelli, a military engineer. Among the machines is a bookstand that revolves like a Ferris wheel, holding eight books at a constant angle by means of a gearing system used in astronomical clocks. The author comments: "Of course, gravity would have done the job equally well (as it does in a Ferris wheel), but the gearing system allowed Ramelli to demonstrate his considerable skill as a mathematician." Then the author writes: "This splendid folly distracts me-I'm supposed to be looking for screwdrivers."

Here we have the rhythm of the book, which resembles the surface of a pond disturbed by a thrown pebble. Anyway, there are screws in Ramelli's book, presuming absent screwdrivers, and we have retreated another century.

De Re Metallica backs up again, to 1556, with the illustration of a slotted screw to attach the leather to a bellows. An illustrated manuscript of 1475 to 1490--a sort of household manual for a castle--shows slotted screws fastening a leg iron and a pair of manacles--castle staples. This train of thought leads the author to war, a great stimulus to invention, witness radar and the jet engine. Pollard's History of Firearms illustrates a fifteenth-century German equivalent of the sawed-off shotgun in which the stock is screwed to the metal. Research in the Metropolitan Museum of Art turned up a screw of the 1480s attaching parts of a suit of armor.

Screws were slotted with a hacksaw and the threads were filed by hand until, in 1760, Job and William Wyatt in Staffordshire patented a machine that turned out more consistent screws at the rate of one about every six seconds. The author comments that, a century before the industrial revolution, "their factory was the earliest example of an industrial process designed specifically to shift control over the quality of what was being produced from the skilled artisan to the machine itself"

This triumph notwithstanding, when teetering on a stepladder, "the [slotted] screw wobbles, the screwdriver slips, the screw falls to the ground and rolls away, the handyman curses--not for the first time--the inventor of this maddening device."

The savior, in this case, was Peter L. Robertson, a young Canadian traveling salesman who invented things in his spare time. His efforts to push an improved corkscrew, novel cuff links, and a more diabolical mousetrap failed. However, the socket-head screw he patented in 1907 succeeded. It was self-centering, could be driven with one hand, and the driver stayed in the socket. Furniture makers, boat builders, and Henry Ford appreciated the economies to be realized with these screws.

In 1936 Henry F. Phillips, also once a traveling salesman, patented the cruciform head known to us all. It was first used by General Motors in the 1936 Cadillac, and within three years most screw makers produced Phillips head screws under license from the inventor.

The first screwdriver the author found was in the late fifteenth-century castle manual cited above. It appears in the careful drawing of a screw-cutting lathe and was used to adjust the cutter. "Eureka!I've found it. The first screwdriver. No improvised gadget but a remarkably refined tool, complete with a pear-shaped wooden handle to give a good grip, and what appears to be a metal ferrule where the metal blade meets the handle....there is no doubt that a full-fledged screwdriver existed three hundred years before the tool portrayed in the Encyclopedie." Since the lathe was shown in a chapter devoted to machines of war "it is likely that screwdrivers appeared first in military workshops, though perhaps not in France, as I had assumed, but in Germany"