“Nobody” was invented, or introduced at the Farnborough pottery, by one Ninety Harris.… It was when the workshops were being extended … that Ninety, a young man then, found an odd end of plank lying about and got a carpenter to bore a hole in the middle of it and put in a leg. This was the origin of “Nobody.” Ninety Harris used it to sit upon, while he was making the final preparation of clay before rolling it up into lumps to “throw” on to the wheel. He sat at a bench, working the clay up into a paste under the heel of his hand. It had already been trodden, but now the tinier pellets of dryness had to be worked out—for in a pot or pan they would have burst in the burning. So the potter sat picking them out, throwing them in the “squibber” by his side, swaying to and fro, with a pushing motion, “exactly like making up butter,” and putting the lumps of clay aside in a heap for carrying to the wheel. Working so, he needed no fixed seat, but this one-legged “Nobody” swayed to his movements, giving him all the support he wanted. No one in the shop had seen such a thing before; but all were glad to use it after Ninety Harris had shown the way. When not in use, “Nobody” lay on its side on the floor.
A conventional stool would certainly not have allowed Ninety Harris or the other shop employees the freely churning motion that made the chore of working up the clay less tiring and hence more efficient—and perhaps even a bit enjoyable. The specialized stools seem to have been affectionately named in recognition of their individuality and preference by the workers, much as some people today are known to name their automobiles. Furthermore, by giving the stools names, the workers could easily demand of a shop boy a particular one.
Sturt goes on to distinguish tools from furniture and apparatus, like stools and the squibber (which was nothing more than a tub of water that gradually filled up with clay), and notes that the potter’s tools “were very few.” The potters were, however, possessive of what tools they did have. One tool, called a “ribber,” was used to groove pots. Ribbers helped make a more uniform groove than could be achieved with the fingers alone, and the implements were frequently fashioned by the potter himself. He so prized them that if he moved to another shop “he did not leave them behind for any successor, but was jealous to take them with him.”
Whether apparatus or tools, the form of the potter’s equipment developed to make both his gross and fine motions more efficient and reliable, and such are the ends toward which all tools are modified from their unsatisfactory predecessors, thus removing their shortcomings. In his foreword to an illustrated encyclopedia of tools, W. L. Goodman writes that our “progress has been largely a matter of inventing new tools and improving the old ones,” but he also points out how frustrating he has found the study of tools, in large part because the tradesmen who “did know and care” about tools did not write about them. Furthermore, a medieval craft was considered a “mystery,” and an attitude of secrecy prevailed that has persisted down to modern times:
A stranger entering the workshop was a signal for men to put their tools away and when any questions were asked about them it was not unusual to offer frivolous or totally misleading answers. As a rule, the men of learning were in no position to disbelieve what they were told and very often the more unexpected the answer the more impressed they were; after all, it was coming straight from the horse’s mouth as it were. There are, in fact, several cases where the exact purpose of some tools in common use only a few generations ago are [sic] not now known for certain and can only be a matter of more or less informed argument.
There were, of course, some notable exceptions among “the men who wrote the books,” including Georgius Agricola (De Re Metallica, 1556), Joseph Moxon (Mechanick Exercises, 1678–84), and Denis Diderot (L’Encyclopédie, 1751–72), but even tools of the last century survive without verbal descriptions of their function, instructions for their use, or names.
The purpose of unusual old tools that collectors have acquired, often precisely because of their oddity and challenge, may be difficult to ascertain, but that is not to say that collectors do not try. One of the delights of antique dealers and collectors, as opposed to the taciturn users of tools, seems to be discovering and explaining the uses of the unusual. One organization of avid tool collectors, the Early American Industries Association, has a Whatsit Committee, and the association’s quarterly journal, The Chronicle, has a regular column headed “Whatsits?” in which puzzles are posed and solutions proposed for now unrecognizable everythings from scoops to nuts. Look-alike items in old catalogues often present convincing evidence of what something was once used for, but there is by no means unanimity on every mysterious artifact. The purposes of oddly shaped knives and shears are perennial topics of speculation. Some of the most curious tools that have been incontrovertibly identified, and those that we still use today, provide excellent opportunities to test any hypothesis of artifactual evolution, and a universally applicable evolutionary principle that explains how each different tool, no matter how odd, comes to be from its predecessors might assist in identifying the unusual.
Agricola’s monograph on mining was one of the first books to record systematically the ways and tools of a craft or trade, and is especially distinguished by its innovative use of illustrations. One shows a silversmith at work on some metal, and into a nearby stump is stuck what looks like a pair of shears, one of the handles of which is bent into an L-shape. It is the bend of the handle that distinguishes this tool from a more ordinary pair of contemporary shears. Agricola thus comments on the oddity and describes it as “an iron tool similar to a pair of shears. One blade of these shears is three feet long, and is firmly fixed in a stump, and the other blade which cuts the metal is six feet long.” The term “blade” here includes the handle, and clearly this tool is designed to give plenty of leverage. Its form also serves another function, one that more conventional shears failed to perform effectively.
The problem with using ordinary shears in the situation depicted in Agricola’s illustration is that the silversmith has only two hands. If he is without a helper and wishes to cut the piece of metal that he is working on, he has either to put the piece of silver on the edge of the stump and snip it with the shears or to put the silver in the shears and balance it there while the handles are pressed together. Either maneuver would require contortions, balance, and luck to produce a clean and accurate cut. Thus, ordinary shears fail to be an efficient and effective tool in this circumstance. However, when they were modified, by forming one of the handles into a L-shape, and perhaps by adding a chisel edge at the bottom of the L, the handle could be driven into a wooden stump and the shears could be at the ready to be operated by a single hand while the other steadied and guided the work. No doubt much more efficient and precise work could be carried out with such bench shears, a tool that evolved in response to the failure of conventional shears to work as well as the lone silversmith would have liked.
Georgius Agricola’s treatise, De Re Metallica, was profusely illustrated to show the tools and processes used in mining and metalworking in the mid-sixteenth century. This woodcut shows, among other things, “an iron tool similar to a pair of shears” but differing in having one of its handles bent and formed into a spike so that the shears could be anchored in a stump of wood. Shears not so modified to free one of the metalworker’s hands were awkward for unassisted use. (photo credit 7.1)
Specialized tools like bench shears have proliferated throughout history in part because craftsmen necessarily do the same task with the same tool over and over. After a while, the task becomes routine, and the craftsman is able to perform it with predictable skill. The most creative of artisans is frequently one who, in the midst of routine, pays attention to the details of the work and the tools that effect that work, and so it is that the reflective craftsman develops ideas for new and improved tools in the course of working with those that he perceives to limit his achievement or efficiency.
Though modern scholar-craftspeople, such as the television woodwright Roy Underhill or the many t
alented artisans at Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia, are more interested in recovering and preserving knowledge of and skill with old tools than in devising new ones, their demonstrations and explanations of the things they work with and on provide much insight into the evolution of artifacts generally. At Williamsburg, many of the tools, especially saws, look just like their counterparts sold in hardware stores today. This suggests that by colonial times these tools had evolved to a high degree of “perfection” for their specialized tasks. Because so many of today’s saws have had their form fixed for centuries, we can confidently infer from our own experience with them their use in earlier times.
The earliest metal saws date from the discovery of copper in the Near East some four thousand years ago. As bronze replaced copper, so iron replaced bronze, when each old material failed to be as efficacious as the newer. In the seventeenth century, before wide steel strips could be rolled, the strongest and hardest saw blades were necessarily narrow—hence the widespread use of the bow saw, in which a wooden frame keeps the blade in tension the way a hunting bow keeps a string in tension. Such saws are still popular in Europe, while wide-bladed steel saws have generally replaced the bow in English-speaking countries. Incidentally, this fact, combined with the divergent design of Oriental hand saws, which cut on the pull stroke (as opposed to most Western saws, which cut on the push stroke), provides further evidence that no unique form follows the single function of cutting wood.
The basic principle behind the operation of a saw is, of course, to cut a groove, called a “kerf,” into a piece of timber or wood so as to separate it into two parts. The teeth on the earliest saws, said perhaps to have evolved from actual tooth-embedded jawbones of dead animals, must not have been very specialized, but they have evolved into an elaborate diversity of styles, spacings, and settings. Whether wood is cut across or with the grain, for example, presents different problems to the saw teeth, and a single saw with a single edge of uniformly spaced teeth will not work equally well in both situations. In cutting across the grain, individual wood fibers themselves must be cut, and so crosscut saw teeth have naturally evolved into a series of knifelike tools along the edge of the blade. In ripsawing, along the grain, a chiseling action is preferable, and so the ripsaw teeth that have developed to perform that task best look and act like a series of little chisels.
The kerf created by a saw with teeth that are in the plane of a saw blade, as we can imagine they most likely were on the first saws, would tend to fill up with sawdust and pinch the saw blade as it progressed into the cut. Although this failure to function smoothly was corrected in part by spacing the teeth so they double as rake tines to pull out the sawdust while at the same time acting as tools to cut the wood, it was setting the teeth alternately left and right that allowed a kerf wider than the saw blade to be cut and hence not pinch it. But the same saw-tooth design would not have worked equally well for soft- and hardwoods. In cutting the former, a lot of sawdust is produced quickly, and so saws suited for softwood developed wider-spaced teeth with large gaps to catch and carry relatively large amounts of sawdust to the end of the kerf. Hardwoods, on the other hand, yield sawdust much more slowly, and so saws suited to them can and do have smaller and more closely set teeth.
Cutting down large trees naturally required saws that were not limited in the depth of their cut, the way bow saws are. The long-and relatively wide-bladed saw with handles on each end was designed to be operated with the muscle power of two woodsmen, one pulling on the cutting stroke (the long, untensed blade would buckle if it cut on a push stroke) and the other pulling the saw back into position for the next cutting stroke (or cutting also, if the saw had teeth to cut both ways). Once the tree was felled, it could be cut up into logs by the same saw, but then the heavy logs had to be cut lengthwise into boards, and the felling saw failed to do this without encountering new problems. If the log were cut where it lay on the ground in the forest, the saw would have had to be used in a horizontal position, and the saw wielders would have had to stoop very low to perform a difficult task. The four-to-seven-foot length of the saw would have meant that it bent noticeably under gravity, and this distortion, combined with the pinching action of the wood on the blade, would have made it very difficult to get a clean cut. Furthermore, gravity would not assist in removing sawdust. These several negative aspects of sawing boards horizontally out of a log on the ground led to the development of the saw pit, the pit saw, and the pitman.
In order to keep gravity from bending their saw and closing the kerf behind it—and, indeed, to turn gravity to their advantage—the sawyers could respectively position themselves one on top and one below the log, which then necessarily had to have space for a man between it and the ground. This objective was sometimes achieved by propping the log up at an angle or on sawhorses, but in any case this required not only lifting heavy logs a fair distance, but also repositioning them as the sawcut progressed, thus giving gravity the last laugh. For efficient sawing, the entire log had to be raised almost the length of the saw, and the lower man could get his full weight behind his saw stroke only if he could stand up. This arrangement is depicted frequently in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, but raising a heavy log six or seven feet into the air is no mean task, and substantial sawhorses or scaffolding would be needed to allow the men to resist the undesirable rocking induced in the sawing operation. Whereas this might be the most expeditious way to proceed at a temporary construction site, men who worked a considerable amount of timber at one location came to dig a pit over which the logs could be rather easily rolled into position and manipulated throughout the sawing process. The action of pit sawing is described romantically by Roy Underhill, who seems to relish the opportunity to try any old craft specialty:
It’s a rare music you hear, shuffling ankle deep in fresh sawdust, elbows sweeping scant inches from the tarred plank walls of the sawpit. With each downward stroke the chorus of teeth on the 7-foot-long steel blade rips another half inch along the length of the log. The foot-thick log above your head and the walls of the pit exclude the noise and distraction of the town. There is only the relentless progression of the blade down the charcoal-struck line.…
Traditionally, the top sawyer was the senior of the two, owner of the saw and caretaker of its sharpness.… The pull stroke of the pitman does the actual cutting of the wood, but he is able to use his weight to his advantage. The top man has most of the responsibility for keeping the cut straight on course and must pull the saw back up with his arms and shoulders alone.
This illustration from L’Encyclopédie shows a two-man frame saw in use to rip boards. The extended top handle relieves the top sawyer from stooping as if to touch his toes with each stroke and keeps his fingers from being caught between the saw and the board, a hazard to which the lower sawyer must be alert. In England and America the bottom sawyer commonly worked in a narrow pit beneath the work piece. (photo credit 7.2)
George Sturt, who operated a wheelwright’s shop and employed sawyers about a hundred years before Underhill’s reveling in the sawpit, had a different recollection of the “sawyers’ more recondite work … usually under the wheelwright’s eye.” Sturt’s description of the lot of both the sawyer and the pitman was less sanguine and charitable:
Laborious it was in the extreme; and the sawdust poured down on his sweating face and bare arms, and down his back; but at least he was spared the trouble of thinking much. To be sure, he might not go quite off to sleep, although his view went no farther than the end of the saw-pit, and his body and arms were working laboriously up and down for hours. But there were short breaks. Now his mate would call down to him to oil the saw. For this purpose he had a rag tied to a stick, kept in a tin of linseed oil in a crevice of the saw-pit.…
But the top-sawyer had no such easy time. He, master of the saw, not only had to keep pace (and more toilsomely, I was assured) with the other’s rhythmical lift and pull. It fell also to the top-sawyer to keep constant watch on the work, with a spec
ial eye on the saw’s action. The least deviation from the straight line might spoil the timber, besides bringing the work to a standstill. And it was more likely to be his saw’s fault in bad sharpening.…
Sharpening times were bad times for the bottom-sawyer. The temporary rest left him at a loose end for an hour or so. None could blame him if he slouched off for a drink, where he might find a fire to sit by and somebody to talk to. Unfortunately, he was not always in a hurry to go back to work. To the top-sawyer, sharpening was none the more welcome on this account. To know that the other fellow was in the bliss of a tap-room, while he himself was tied to a job, earning no money and using up a sixpenny file—to know all this made sharpening a nuisance at the best.…
The sawyers were on the whole so erratic I was always glad to see the back of them. Yet the real trouble was that, as competition grew, a less costly way of getting timber had to be found. At any rate, when planks could be bought in London nearly fit to use, it would no longer do to buy local timber and pay for sawing it, thereby locking up one’s money for years while the timber dried. Timber-merchants might do some of that. It was for them to employ the sawyers—or to set up the steam saws.
But long before steam power drove saws down another evolutionary path, sawyers had found fault with the felling saw as a pit saw. Handles set in the plane of the saw blade had worked well for a man felling trees but proved almost impossible to use for one balancing on a log or squeezed into a pit. How much more convenient it was to have the handles set crosswise to the saw blade, so that top and bottom sawyer alike could stand facing the length of the log and watch their work progress without twisting their necks. In time, the top handle came to be attached to a two-foot extension so that the saw could be pulled down to its last teeth without the top sawyer’s having to bend over as if touching his toes. And the bottom sawyer’s handle evolved into one that was easily removed in times when the saw had to be pulled up out of the pit for sharpening. In every case, the modifications from felling saw to pit saw were made in response to an inconvenience or a failure to perform as well as sawyers could imagine.
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are. Page 14
