One Good Turn

The History of the Screwdriver and the Screw - 2000 - Witold Rybczynski

This book traces the history of the screw in an "entertaining" way, that is, lots of historical citations in reverse chronological order, back to the water screw of Archimedes around 250 B.C. Working forward, we get to the screw presses of Hero around 60 A.D., the screws holding together body armor, then adjusting flintlocks, then wood screws for assembing things. The watershed moment is Henry Maudslay and the precision screw, which led to interchangable screws and nuts, then forward to the American UTS and everywhere-else ISO standard threads. In 1933, Portland engineer John P. Thompson invented and patented the cruciform head screw socket that Portland businessman Henry F. Phillips refined into the eponymous screw, which he licensed to American Screw Company in 1936. The rest, as they say, is history.