ONE GOOD TURN: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw

When the New York Times Magazine asked for an essay on the best tool of the millennium, Rybczynski settled on the humble screwdriver. One Good Turn recounts his broadening gyre of historical research and, in the process, reminds us that extraordinary stories sometimes lurk behind ordinary things.

A professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986), Rybczynski begins with a look at the cursory lexicographical attention routinely paid to the word screwdriver, proceeds in search of the origins of the tool earlier generations called turn screw, and then, perhaps more important, concentrates on the screw. "The screwdriver is hardly poetic...." he writes. "The screw itself, however, is a different matter. It is hard to imagine that even an inspired gunsmith or armorer—let alone a village blacksmith— simply happened on the screw by accident."

The screw thread is not, he explains, a spiral but a helix, "a three-dimensional curve that twists around a cylinder at a constant inclined angle." The earliest known helix was the water screw developed in the third century b.c., probably by Archimedes: "Only a mathematical genius like Archimedes could have described the geometry of the helix in the first place, and only a mechanical genius like him could have conceived a practical application for this unusual shape."

The innovation most of us take for granted, the cruciform-shaped, socket-headed screw, was patented and marketed by Henry F. Phillips in the 1930s but essentially invented in 1907 by a Canadian, Peter L. Robertson. By enabling machines to drive screws, the socket-headed screw dramatically improved assembly line efficiency, especially at Ford Motor Company, and opened the way for the robotic-driven assembly of machines.

"Mechanical genius is less well understood and studied than artistic genius," Rybczynski observes, "yet it surely is analogous." The kitchen-drawer screwdriver has a lineage going back to Archimedes and perhaps beyond, one every bit as grand as any tradition taught in fine arts classrooms. Though it slights the role of screws in cultures other than European, One Good Turn is a wonderfully researched, written, and illustrated book, a pocket model of superb material-culture research.

—John R. Stilgoe