What’s lacking in “One Good Turn” are people. It was a wonderful labor-saving device, used in milling and printing, and able to increase the amount of force a person could place on an object or use to lift one up.

(That’s pretty amazing when you think about it - that screws had to be filed by hand from nails and rivets, and no two were alike until the 1800s.) The concept of the screw itself dates back to the ancients, but were thought of more as an inclined plane around a shaft than the wall fastener we have today. The screwdriver was derived from earlier tools with sharp edges, then refined after industrial processes made screws a mass-produced product. But maybe it should have stopped there.īecause “One Good Turn” doesn’t have much more to say. After some process of elimination – this tool was too old, this one not necessary enough – Rybczynski settled on the screwdriver, which had been invented in the 18th century. Rybczynski, an architecture professor at Penn, had been asked to write about “the best tool of the millennium” for a special issue of The New York Times Magazine. Part of the problem, I think, is that the book began as an essay in The New York Times. Well, I don’t want to say I was screwed, but “One Good Turn” was about as interesting as inserting a drill bit. So when I picked up “One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw,” I thought, how bad could it be? I mean, it’s a slim work – 151 pages, including many illustrations – and though the screwdriver itself might seem like a better topic for Rybczynski’s ally in explanation, engineering professor Henry Petroski (“The Evolution of Useful Things”), I figured that Rybczynski probably had a number of Bill Bryson-like anecdotes up his sleeve. Though I wasn’t as impressed by “Last Harvest” or “Home: The Short History of an Idea,” they were readable, thorough, and filled with interesting tidbits. “City Life” was a fascinating history of urban development “Waiting for the Weekend” was a brisk look at how we created the modern workweek. I generally like the books of Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski

City life witold rybczynski