Title: One Good Turn

Speaker: Witold Rybczynski

Abstract

This lecture is based on the book One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. The origin of One Good Turn was the request by a New York Times editor to write an essay on the theme of the best tool of the millennium. This simple question led me to medieval armor, matchlock guns, and the first printing press. I delved into Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci. I encountered the irrepressible military engineer Agostino Ramelli, and the great Victorian mechanic Henry Maudsley. I also made the acquaintance of Peter Robertson, the Canadian inventor of the Robertson screwdriver.

I've always loved tools, ever since my wife and I built our own house by hand. Traditional tools are personable and accommodating, the result of centuries of refinement and evolution. Hammers, saws, screwdrivers, we use them every day and we take them for granted. Yet they are amazing achievements, no less momentous human discoveries than fire, the telephone, or the computer.

My search for the best tool led me to the humble screwdriver, a tool that unexpectedly changed the course of civilization. But who invented the screwdriver, and its alter ego the screw? ONE GOOD TURN provides the fascinating answers to those questions. In the process we discover that without screws there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no Enlightenment science. Without screws there would be no sextant, hence no great voyages of discovery. The screw also played a pivotal role in the development of machine production, the key to the Industrial Revolution.

The screwdriver, perhaps the last tool in a world gone cyber, represents nothing less than the triumph of precision, mass production, and the human imagination.

Speaker

Witold Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh of Polish parentage. He received Bachelor and Master of Architecture degrees from McGill University in Montreal, where he also taught. His architectural experience has included working for Moshe Safdie on Habitat, and designing and building houses. He received a Progressive Architecture award for his research on housing. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and has received received the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award.

His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and The Public Interest. His book Home has been translated into eight languages. The bestselling The Most Beautiful House in the World won the 1989 QSPELL prize for non-fiction, and City Life won a literary award from the Philadelphia Athenaeum. A Clearing in the Distance, a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a Christopher Award, and a Philadelphia Athenaeum literary award. One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw was published simultaneously in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Spain. His latest book, based on the New York Public Library/Oxford University Press lectures is The Look of Architecture.

Witold Rybczynski lives with his wife Shirley Hallam in Philadelphia where he is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor in Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.

Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Brent Warner

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov