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

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. By Witold Rybczynski. New York: Scribner, 2000. Pp. 173. $22.

A formula has emerged with the recent works of Henry Petroski and Robert Friedel, among others, authors of books exhaustively chronicling the histories of everyday devices such as pencils, zippers, paper clips, and billiard balls. Now, University of Pennsylvania professor of urbanism Witold Rybczynski, author of books on the house and the landscape, joins the ranks of these biographers of commonplace items with this historical account of the screwdriver and, incidentally, the wood screw and the machine screw. Clearly, educated and inquiring audiences for such histories abound, but Petroski and Friedel have also sought to tie their books to the expectations of historians who will look for flaws in focus stemming from too narrow a gaze on one solitary technology. Rybczynski confronts another hazard, the danger of excessive breadth.

The saga begins with a 1999 challenge from the New York Times to identify "the best tool of the millennium." Rybczynski ponders the tool chest, finds the screwdriver the most mysterious tool therein, and begins his quest through literature and museum collections for the First Screwdriver. After much searching he finds it portrayed in the Medieval Housebook of 1475. On the way backward, he chronicles the rise of the Phillips-head screw and the Robertson (square-socket) screw, the transition from hand-filed screws to machine-made screws, and the leap of imagination required in shifting from peg, strap, and nail to the more efficient screwed fastener. Early screws had square or octagonal heads turned with a wrench. The emergence of our slotted screw head answered the need for a flush fit.

Rybczynski is baffled by the interchangeable use of the terms "screwdriver" and "turnscrew" in the literature, recalling Gary Larson's famous cartoon factory manager: "We're proud of our product, Mr. Fudd, and there's no company in the world that builds a finer skwoo dwivuh . . . Dang! Now you've got me doing it!" But our author moves on without pause from screwdrivers to the larger topic of screw threads generally and ends with Archimedes. "The discovery of the screw represents a kind of miracle. Only a mathematical genius like Archimedes could have described the geometry of the helix in the first place" (p. 143).

From Agricola and Ramelli to Gutenberg and Diderot, Rybczynski describes the first appearance of threaded screws in wine presses and printing presses, knight's armor, and firearms. Indeed, his "natural history" reads like the great-man European histories of old, with hagiographic accounts of the screw-cutting lathe drawn directly from the standard works of Samuel Smiles, L. T. C. Rolt, and Robert Woodbury. The threaded rod is handed like a baton from Leonardo to Besson to Plumier to Ramsden to Maudslay to Whitworth to Clement in a continuous stream of ever more precise screw threads. Fittingly, Rybczynski observes that "mechanical genius is less well understood and studied than artistic genius, yet it surely is analogous" (p. 110).

The notion that invention occurs incrementally and often anonymously through countless small improvements, and that "firsts" and "greatests" are to be approached with extreme care, does not mute Rybczynski's ode to the great screw makers of Europe. By chapter 6, the reader begins to long for news that Torquemada invented thumb screws, just to complete the group portrait of Great Men with their Great Screws.

Unfortunately, the author's reliance on outdated histories prevents him from including Bruce Sinclair's important study on the subject, "At the Turn of a Screw: William Sellers, the Franklin Institute, and a Standard American Thread" (T&C, January 1969). The great debates over the Whitworth (English) thread form versus the Sellers (American) thread would be especially meaningful for Rybczynski, considering the origins of both screw threads in the workshop practices of hands-on mechanics, rather than the...