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One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw
Witold Rybczynski
Witold Rybczynski—architect, professor, and one of the finest writers on how things are made—turns his attention to the humblest of tools: the screw. Begun as a magazine assignment to name the best tool of the past millennium, One Good Turn (2000) grows into a wonderfully digressive history that runs from Archimedes and his water-screw through Leonardo's sketches of screw-cutting machines to the standardization battles of the industrial age and the underappreciated genius of Canada's Robertson drive. Rybczynski's argument is quietly radical: without the screw there is no telescope, no microscope, no precision at all—and therefore no modern science. It's a small book about a small object that keeps opening onto larger questions of craft, invention, and how civilizations solve problems. Warm, curious, and beautifully economical, it's the kind of book that changes how you look at your toolbox.
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The author
Witold Rybczynski (b. 1943) is a Canadian-American architect and emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, best known for graceful books that explain the built and made world to general readers—Home, The Most Beautiful House in the World, and A Clearing in the Distance. He writes as an insider who never loses the outsider's curiosity.
The book
One Good Turn began in 1999 when a New York Times Magazine editor asked him to name the most useful tool of the previous thousand years. He settled on the screwdriver—but couldn't explain the screwdriver without the screw, and couldn't explain the screw without tracing it back to Archimedes, Leonardo, and the machinists who finally learned to cut threads accurately. The result is part detective story, part meditation on precision.
How it reads
Slim and companionable. Rybczynski's gift is to make a technical subject feel like good conversation, and the book rewards anyone who has ever wondered why an everyday object takes the exact form it does.
For more context
Pairs naturally with his Home and with Henry Petroski's essays on everyday engineering, which share its affection for overlooked design.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Witold Rybczynski
- Publisher
- Scribner
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2000
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine