A Brief History of the Wood Screw, As Used In Furniture Construction

Leo Bjorkegren, Fda Furniture Year 1

“Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we

can perform without thinking about them” (Whitehead, 1911)

“There are other methods of screwing, but they are not of interest to the amateur”
(Waverley Book Company Ltd, 1920)

The quote from A.N. Whitehead which heads this essay is really intended to refer to
mental operations, but may be appropriated for small, useful items like the
woodscrew, which are now so ubiquitous as to be beyond most people’s notice. More
generally, it can refer to a class of assumptions that we hold about the world (e.g. that
machine-made components should fit together successfully).

In the history of technology, the development of the woodscrew follows a familiar

pattern, developing over several hundred years, from a small hand-made item used
only by specialist artificers, to a commodity churned out by the billions and available
in a very wide range of sizes, finishes and applications.

From the perspective of the 21st century, it is apparent that its history follows a rough
exponential curve – production grew very slowly for many hundreds of years, demand
being limited by cost and the relatively small number of applications, and supply
being limited by difficulties in manufacture. Following the essential standardisation of
thread sizes by Whitworth, and the creation of suitable machine tools, production and
use increased year on year for a very long period.

This is a very large subject, for such a small object, and it is only by a severe process
of compression, abbreviation and omission that it is possible to fit it into the relatively
meagre constraints of a 2,000 word essay.

Widdershins or deosil?

For any item that rotates, someone has to make a decision – which way?

The vast majority of screw threads now made are right-handed, which means that they
are turned clockwise to drive in (from the point of view of the driver). Notable
exceptions exist – fittings for gas bottles appear to be uniformly left-handed, the
thread direction for bicycle pedals depends on the side of the bike – but generally, the
overwhelming consensus is that threads are right-handed.

A possible origin for this is simple geography. In the northern hemisphere, deosil (or
deasil, deisal etc) is the clockwise or sunwise direction. An observer will see the sun
rising in the east, passing through noon in the south, and setting in the west. The sun
moves sunwise, or clockwise. Facing north, and watching a sundial, the shadow will
again move in a sunwise or clockwise direction.
When designing the first mechanical clocks it would have been a natural choice to
make the hands go in a sunwise direction. By the time the Industrial Revolution was
in full swing, and screw production was fully mechanised, then the clockwise
direction would be ingrained. It is probably not a coincidence that the muscles of the
right hand favour a clockwise turn. However, if industrial nations had first arisen in
the Southern hemisphere then the common thread direction might have been reversed.

Nails or screws?

At first sight it is not obvious why there is a need for screws at all. Nails are cheaper
to make, quicker to put in, generally with simpler tools, and tend to do less damage to
the wood that they are driven through. Furthermore, there are applications (such as the
construction of large timber structures) where nails are clearly superior, because they
tend to be more flexible and hence will tolerate movement. Screws, on the other hand,
tend to be more brittle, more suited to static loading, and will fail under a shearing
load.

However, there are a number of other advantages on the side of the screw :

1. They generally require less work to install, and even this can be supplied
electrically, e.g. a driver bit in an electric drill
2. They impose less in the way of force on the receiving structure – some of the
energy from hammering a nail will inevitably be transmitted into the table,
wall or other item that the nail is being put into, and this may not be tolerable
for fragile items
3. The bond between a screw and the material that is is embedded in is simply
stronger. A nail will generally pull out before breaking (unless rusted in) – a
screw will generally break before pulling out (unless the wood is rotten)
4. Screws are adjustable, and can be removed – there is some leeway when
putting a nail in, but little chance of easing one out a bit when hammered in
too tight. Screws can also be removed and re-used
5. The strength of a nailed joint depends largely on the length of the nail
embedded in the material. The strength of a screwed joint is generally only
dependent on a few threads [Gordon, 1968] and it doesn’t matter so much
where those few threads are – this means that it is possible to securely join
thin materials without having to run a nail through both and clinch it.

As will be seen below, points 4 and 5 above were probably critical to the early
success of the screw.

How are screws made?

There are relatively few methods for the actual production of a screw. The options can
be grouped into hand methods and automatic methods, the automatic methods coming
into use from the nineteenth century onwards.

Hand Methods

Casting This is rare, because slow, expensive and not very accurate, and
difficult to do for iron or steel. Not widely used but feasible for
 bronze or copper
Filing The main method used for most of recorded history. Slow, not
accurate, not repeatable, poor quality
Die Turning The rounded metal blank is rotated through a die which cuts the
thread into it. Repeatable, but slow, and requires good hardened steel
for the die body
Twisting One often ignored method of creating a screw thread is to simply
twist a piece of heated square section metal around until reasonable
threads are generated. This method was used on a large scale during
the construction of railways in this country and elsewhere. The
process is reasonably quick once the stock is squared and heated, but
does not produce an accurately repeatable thread. The picture below
shows a section of a threaded bolt made by the author.

Figure 1 : Twisted Forged Bolt (picture by author)

Automatic Methods

Automatic Once the automatic screw cutting lathe was invented, this became the
Lathe Cutting main and best method of creating threaded items. Fast, accurate,
allows for production of threads with a specified geometry
Die Pressing This is a current method for mass production; the screw blank is
rolled between two moving dies that impress the thread onto it. Fast,
accurate and may improve the strength of the screw by compressing
the metal into the thread profile rather than cutting it away

History of the screw

The screw thread appears to have considerably predated the wood screw. The Archimedean
screw, used for lifting water, was well known in antiquity, and in fact was used about 400
years before Archimedes, in the year 700 BC, and is mentioned in connection with the then
King of Assyria, Sennacherib [TATHS 2018]. The large threaded bolt, used as part of a
screw press, was known in the 1st century AD, and small bronze screws, presumably hand-
filed, were used in the instruments of the time. Some small threaded items from Roman times
have been found, although it is unclear whether these were used in furniture or in jewellery.
There is great difficulty in finding any small metal object after several hundred or thousand
years!

The first screwdriver for which we have definite documentary evidence is shown in
the Mediaeval Housebook, a hand-written manuscript believed to originate in
Germany in the last quarter of the fifteenth century [Christof Graf zu Wadberg
Wolfegg, 1998]. However, this is shown as part of an illustration for a screw-cutting
lathe, which implies that screws were well-known and reasonably common at that
time. Very few people write about screwdrivers as a matter of course, with the
possible exception of Brian Eno, who occasionally lectures on the subject [Eno,
2018].

Usage would be common, however, only in fairly specialised applications, the most
evident being to do with arms and armour. One surprising application is the fixing of
plate armour for knights before battle. Simplifying matters somewhat (and ignoring a
whole host of specialised names), the suit of armour must protect the torso, the neck,
the head, the hips, the shoulders etc. Each area to be protected must be covered by a
separate piece of armour, and these must all be connected together in some way if the
hapless knight is to be protected from the weapons of his enemy. There is some
evidence [Rybczynski, 2001] to show that pieces of armour were bolted together,
which would require threaded bolts and nuts, though each nut and bolt would form a
unique pair.

Another application to do with arms would arise with the development of the portable
gun. Early firearms resembled a miniature cannon on a stick and tended to throw the
firer backward through recoil. More developed arms were made in quantity, but
before the days of accurate machining and mass production; accordingly some
adjustment was often required when assembling the parts. This was provided in part
by the screwnail, which was a nail that could be driven in with a hammer, but adjusted
with a wrench.

Another less obvious application is in the production of saddles, bellows and similar
items where it may be necessary to fix several thin layers together. With a broad-
headed short screw, for example, it is possible to fix a layer of leather or fabric onto a
thin wooden panel, with good performance and no need to drive a nail through for
clinching.

Much later (about 1850), a novel demand for screws arose with the invention and
general adoption of the butt hinge, which allows the mechanism of the hinge to be
largely hidden. Unfortunately, it is completely impossible to use with nails, which
would simply pull out, unlike the clinched nails used with earlier strap hinges. The
great expansion of building in the Victorian era, together with all the internal
furnishings and ironmongery required for the new dwellings, may have done much to
drive demand for the new lathe-cut screws.

Various evolutions in shape and function have had to occur before the well-known
woodscrew of today could be created. Much of this is due to the development of
machine tools, which have made some features available which would not have been
possible for hand worked items.

As an example, early screws were often made as an offshoot of nail manufacture, and
shared some of the main features. Where a nail would be made as a tapered wrought
iron item, a screw would be made as a tapered wrought iron item with threads cut into
it. However, a tapered screw is not ideal unless you also make a tapered drill to cut
the hole for it – and in a world where no one screw is the same as another, this is
never going to happen.

Commercial expansion of wood screw production in this country did not take place
until the mid-18th century, with the production process at the time being essentially a
cottage industry and all work done by hand – i.e. up until this point there were no
machine tools available for the automatic production of screws.

The first parallel-shank iron wood screw was not achieved until 1751, one of a
number of advances made by the Wyatt brothers at this time. Easy forging of screw
head blanks began in France in 1806, at which point several billion woodscrews a
year were being made by one manufacturer alone (for the boots of Napoleon’s army).
Mass production of a screw with a pointed tip (allowing for easier driving into
softwood) was not achieved until the 1840s, in New York.

Bramah, Maudslay and Whitworth

Maudslay, at one time an employee of Joseph Bramah, the famous lock maker,
invented the automatic screw cutting lathe about 1800, which enabled the
standardisation of screw threads for the first time. At this point, the idea of
interchangeable parts (i.e. for a given specification, any bolt would work with any
nut ) became practicable.

Maudslay set up his own workshop in 1797, having left after his request for a payrise
was refused, and adopted the standardised threads in his own products, creating the
tools (taps and dies) to allow these to be made reliably and quickly. However, he did
not attempt to impose a uniform thread nationally.

Joseph Whitworth (later Sir Joseph) worked in Maudslay’s establishment, developing

precision machine tools, and soon founded his own workshop, using innovative
precision measurement techniques, and most pertinently to this essay, designed the
world’s first standardised thread. [Atkinson, 1996]

Prior to Whitworth’s successful standardisation, every manufacturer of machinery

would have his own standards and sets of tools for making threaded objects. This
meant that one manufacturer could not supply a threaded item for another, which
would often lead to significant delay and loss if a breakage occurred.
A more general consequence of this work, both in developing the techniques of
engineering precision, and specifying standard designs, was the significant advance in
what might be called the ‘Technical Design Language’ available to manufacturers.

Present-day engineering practice expects that a specification for an item can be made
clear enough, and precise enough, for a manufacturer on the other side of the world to
make the object, without ever having met or worked with the originator. Before
Maudslay and Whitworth, this would have barely been possible; it is now routine, and
serves as one of the unexamined assumptions that now underpin our civilisation.

Conclusions

The history of the screw thread, as used in wood screws, stretches back several
thousand years, and for most of that time the techniques used in making them would
have changed very little. The advent of the Industrial Revolution brought new ways of
measuring and specifying engineering objects, and the demand that would make it
worth while to engineer and produce these items in bulk.

The wood screw in itself is just one example of a very much wider range of objects,
which are ubiquitous and unthought of, but which provide the material underpinnings
of our civilisation.
References :

1. Atkinson, N, 1996; Sir Joseph Whitworth, the world’s best mechanician; Sutton
Publishing Ltd

2. Dickinson, H.W, 1941; Origin and Manufacture of Wood Screws,

Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 22, pp.78 – 89

3. Eno, B, 2018; Brian Eno; An illustrated talk; [online] Redbullmusicacademy.com;

Available at: http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/events/new-york-2013-brian-
eno-an-illustrated-talk

4. Gordon, J.E, 1968; The New Science of Strong Materials, Penguin

5. Rybczynski, W, 2001; One Good Turn; A Natural History of the Screw and
Screwdriver, Scribner

6. TATHS (2018). Another Turn of the Wood Screw. [online] Taths.org.uk. Available at:
http://taths.org.uk/tools-trades/articles/42-another-turn-of-the-wood-screw [Accessed
12 Jun. 2018].

7. Wadburg Wolfegg, C.G. zu, 1998; Venus and Mars; The World of the
Mediaeval Housebook, Munich

8. Waverley Book Company,The, 1920; The amateur mechanic,Vol IV, London

9. Whitehead, A.N, 1911; An introduction to mathematics, H Holt & Co.