The Fastener Industry

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with The Fastener Industry, this an engineer's non-technical look at nuts, bolts, screws and washers. Not simply an engineering lesson but an examination of just how early these technologies were first created and named, how they developed, and why successive improvements were made and by whom. There is a PowerPoint presentation to accompany this talk if required.

The first mention of a ‘screw’ has nothing to do with fastenings. This was the Archimedes screw, a means of raising water, with the water trapped in gaps in the screw thread and raised as the screw was turned endlessly (never tightening as it had no mating part) by an oxen or other draught animal. It is almost certain the screw had nothing to do with Archimedes, nor did it resemble a screw as we would understand it today but appears more like an enlarged corkscrew in a tube. And if you want to see one in action, get yourself a chocolate fountain, it’s the same thing.

The whitworth thread, possibly still the best known thread form, named after Joseph Whitworth who defined the world’s first standard for threads in 1841 and remained popular until the metric system took over in the late 1970s.

Ever wondered why a ‘washer’ when it clearly has nothing in common with ‘washing’? For the engineer it has three practical applications: to prevent damage to a surface from a nut or bolt, as a spacer, and as a locking device. A simple item and a versatile one but nothing compared to the etymology of this six-letter noun. It is easy to find this coming to English from the Old French vis. However, this was not used to mean ‘washer’ but either ‘vice’ or ‘screw’. Both of these should be seen in the sense of ‘tighten’ or ‘wind up’ and related to the root of ‘winch’. Hence this terminology is all interlinked, with the whole assembly speaking about ‘tightening’ both as a whole and individually. Even more intriguing is where the trail leads if we trace this further back through linguistic generations. Ultimately this has the same root as Latin vinis or ‘vine’, itself from viere meaning ‘to bind, twist’. Thus, the climbing vine, which had evolved to wind itself around and climb, eventually gave its name to the fastenings used today to hold the framework up which modern vines are trained.

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.

Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: V

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

V is for vice, the tool used to hold a piece while working on it, or a sin. Taking the latter first, we find the word arriving in English at the end of the 13th century from Old French vice 'fault, defect, misdemeanour'. Further back we find vitium 'offense, blemish, imperfection', but this is as far as we can trace the word.

The tool also comes from Old French, where vis meant 'screw', from Latin vitis 'vine, tendril of a vine'; and thus named from the screw mechanism which, in turn, is likened to the winding of the vine around its support. The tool is not recorded as such until the early sixteen century, prior to that the word could be used to refer to winches for a crossbow or catapult, a spiral staircase, or a twisting tie fastening a hood under the chin.