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. ( )

Screwdrivers > History/Screws > History

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. ( )

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. ( )