Episode 1.9: William Allen and the Key to Success (Script)

Hi. I’m Keith Decent and this is From the Ground Up. A podcast about how we make what we make, the materials, the tools, and the stories behind the things we build.

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There’s good work down in New England. At least that’s what everyone in town had been saying. The Industrial Revolution had galvanized the Northeast United States as THE place to seek a new life, especially for residents of small town Quebec, Canada. Like many before them, the Lachance family, had set off to find the American Dream, before it was even called that, in Bristol, Connecticut.

It seemed as good a town as any other. It had opportunity. The mills and factories would hire French Canadian immigrants, which wasn’t always a guarantee. There was also a whole community of Quebecois. Whole blocks filled with French Speaking neighbors who, like Arthur and Ann-Marie had made this town their home. Little Canada. They even had their own French-speaking parish. St Ann Church. It started a few years ago at town hall, but now services were being held on the second floor of the factory where Arthur worked. The JH Sessions factory, right in the middle of town. Ann-Marie didn’t know how Arthur felt about having to trudge back into the building on a Sunday, but she enjoyed seeing where he worked so hard, for so many hours.

One thing Ann-Marie always noticed were the machines. Arthur worked making trunk hardware, and on his floor were gigantic fearsome machines used to cut and shape the metal pieces. She thought how incredibly loud it must be in this room when everything is running. She glanced at Arthur, who didn’t even acknowledge the iron beasts. His eyes were on the door to their makeshift chapel, just up ahead.

It was a lovely service, as usual. The good lord’s words just seemed so much more interesting in French. So much more relatable. Ann-Marie said as much to Arthur over dinner. He nodded in agreement.

Morning came, and Arthur once again set off for the factory. Men in dingy clothing, bundled up against the blustery New England December wind, lurched forth from doorways throughout the neighborhood. Boys, too. Some as young as 12. A quiet parade of workers, off to fill the factories.

It was around lunch time that Ann-Marie heard the knock at her door. It was too early for Arthur to be home, and too late for any deliveries. She hurried to open it, mostly out of curiosity. She recognized the man standing in her doorway. She did not recognize the expression on his face. It was her husband’s supervisor. His boss. She knew him from those services at St. Anne. He always had a patient smile on during the mass. Now though, his face was twisted up in a grimace. He was holding his hat in his hands, and struggling to introduce himself. Ann-Marie couldn’t pay attention to what he was saying, having just noticed the blood stains on his coveralls.

In the mumbled words he kept repeating she heard a name. Arthur. She was jolted back to reality. He was saying over and over again, slipping in between French and English.

“He’s dead, Ann-Marie. I’m sorry, Arthur is gone.”

She fell into the man’s arms. The warm metallic smell of her husband’s blood, it must have been his, mixed with the smoke and oil smell of the factory. Suddenly she panicked. The thought of those machines, those huge, spinning, grinding beasts. She couldn’t fight the thoughts as they slipped through her mind. “Had he gotten caught up in one? Was there anything left?” She must have been thinking out loud, as the man lowered his voice to a hush.

“It wasn’t that way, dear.” The supervisor had guided her back into the house, sat her down in a chair and explained as best he could. “There was a screw, one of the set screws on the drive shaft of one of the stamping machines.”

She shuddered again just hearing the words, “stamping machine.”

“They spin so fast,” he continued, “and Arthur’s sleeve got caught. His arm was cut deep from wrist to elbow. He bled to death too quickly, before anyone could help. He was peaceful, at the end, and praying. I am terribly sorry.”

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Advertising at the time explained that stories like this were commonplace. The claim was that 1500 people died every year due to accidents similar to what befell poor, old Arthur Lachance. This spurred a few ingenius people to work on the design and manufacture of a new type of screw. One with a recessed socket in it’s head that would not protrude from whatever surface it is driven into.

These now commonplace fasteners are known as Allen Screws, driven most usually by an Allen Key or Wrench. But why that name? Why is it called an Allen Key?

Well, it isn’t. Not technically anyway. While you might be cursing the name Allen while trying to assemble that flat-pack shelving unit, the tool is actually called a hex key. According to most people nerdy enough to actually explore the history of that little tool in the back of your junk drawer, the hex key, and it’s compatible hardware, were probably conceived in the late 19th century. However, no one really had the idea of how to manufacture it until about 1910. At that time, William Allen began manufacturing the “Allen Safety Set Screw” and associated driver in Hartford Ct. After patenting a method of cold forming the recessed head, he began making and distributing the product locally, and many of the Hartford and greater New England area factories immediately became customers. Not only were his screws safer, but they were also much stronger than what was previously being used. His business boomed, spread across the world, and soon the hex screw and the name “Allen” were inextricably linked.

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These days, Allen keys are everywhere. The rise in popularity of flat-pack furniture, that is furniture sold unassembled in order save on shipping and space, has ensured that nearly every household has one of the hexagonal tools sitting in some forgotten corner somewhere.

In the 80s and 90s, IKEA made a huge splash in the world of furniture manufacturing and design. Offering cheap products that looked somewhat high-end made their business model extremely profitable, and they basically took over the planet, one particle board bookcase at a time. Part of the company’s philosophy espouses a sleekness and simplicity common in Scandinavian design. Allen keys, with their recessed heads and elegant drivers, fit right in and were used in most of their unassembled products. Many of their pieces were famous for including everything you need for construction right in the box, enabling the least apt of customers to be able to build their own furniture, in a way. Besides the easy set up, there is also an emotional component to flat pack design. It seems counter intuitive, and IKEA furniture is jokingly famous for breaking up even the strongest of couples, but when someone assembles their own bookcase or sofa, they value that object up to 63% more than if it had been put together for them. It seems, according to studies, that the feeling of accomplishment and pride that comes with assembling your own furniture causes you to just like that furniture more. On the other hand, if the piece is too easy to assemble, then the sense of pride and value is diminished. So the designers have to create a piece that is easy to assemble, but not too easy. Thus is born the “IKEA effect,” in which a customer places a high value on the product due to how much they participate in the process of it’s setup. This often leads to situations where extra parts or a misaligned section causes the customer stress when floundering in the construction of a product advertised as “easy” to assemble that was designed to be fairly tricky.

So with every turn of the hexagonal tool, we can remember Mr Allen building an empire. We can fall in love with our new flat-pack computer desk. And we can wonder, what’s next? As one day, technology will advance again and even the Allen Screw will be a thing of the past (IKEA is already promising a new line of snap-together furniture that uses no fasteners at all).

But for now, remember that little L-shaped wrench, jangling around with the batteries and tape dispensers, and all the lives it both changed and saved on its way to the back of that drawer. Later, makers!

Episode 1.9: William Allen and the Key to Success

No French Canadians were harmed in the making of this podcast. Everyone has one somewhere. The little wrench named after… well some guy probably. But who? And more importantly, why? Today we explore the history of the Allen Screw, how the world brought about its existence, and how it subsequently changed that world.

Music by Lee Roosevere

Episode 1.8: Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey: How the Ancient Greeks Screwed the World (script)

Hi. I’m Keith Decent and this is From the Ground Up. A podcast about how we make what we make, the materials, the tools, and the stories behind the things we build.

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August 24th, 1986, Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The dredging ship, Triton, is working through the night, creating a trench around some wreckage it had accidentally come upon back in early May. Triton is one of many ships tasked with excavating the Slufter, a future disposal site for contaminated silt, a byproduct of natural processes and the operation of the port.

As part of a preservation effort for archaeological discoveries, any shipwrecks found during the operation must be removed carefully and cataloged. The sudden pitch change in the typical clattering cacophony of the ship’s pumps can only mean one thing. There’s another blockage. When the system is cleared, the stoppage turns out to be wooden debris. Not just wood but also coal. Heaps of coal. This is not the same wreckage they were working on. This was an entirely different ship.

The wreck is carefully dug out over the course of several weeks. Half of a timber hull is raised from the depths, cataloged, and reported on. If the wreck as too new to be culturally significant, then the site would be archaeologically abandoned. This turned out to be the case, as the ship, now marked SL 4, was estimated to have been built between the end of the 18th century and 1850. Back then, this area was an open sea port with hazardous sand embankments, instead of the man made haven it had been built into since the 1960s. Until then, the only protection for ships was the guiding beacon of an old, stone lighthouse called Stenen Baak.

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March, 1864. Rough seas. A cargo ship had left Rotterdam on it’s way to Hull when it encountered a storm only a few miles into its journey. Captain Hans Claus Marten had ordered his crew to return to port, but it was too late. A sudden stop jostled every man on board. The dull scraping sound of wood on sand. They were stuck, and it wasn’t long before the vessel sank into the murky depths. The 31 crew members were rescued, and the captain of the rescue ship commissioned a painting of the event. The canvas showed it all. The jagged waves tossing the ill fated ship. The blustering winds filling its sails, sending it spinning uncontrollably toward the sandy banks. An old, stone lighthouse in the distance.

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The ancient kingdom of Syracuse, in what is modern day Sicily, about 240 B.C.E. Archimedes stands on the deck of the Syracusia, a ship he designed and had built by order of his King, Hieron II. It was huge. There’s no other word to describe it. It was the largest ship ever built at the time and had enough room for 1942 passengers, and 1800 tons of cargo. The ship was more of a floating castle, boasting cabins, a library, a reading room, a gymnasium, a chapel dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite, a dining room and a bath. But, like a Greek bath, so think more public wading pool than claw foot tub. The ship had an 18 foot catapult and guard towers on the top decks. It was a serious piece of naval equipment. One of the most interesting features of the Syracusia, however, was that it’s massive bilge, the area in the very bottom of the ship that collects water from all of the above decks. Drainage, spillover from rough seas, that sort of thing. Well, the bilge on the Syracusia could be emptied by just one man.

What should have taken several men hours of hard labor could be accomplished by one man with medium effort thanks to a device Archimedes has invented a few years prior, the Archimedes Screw.

The device itself is a cylindrical shaft, with a flat surface spiraled, on edge, up it’s curved outer wall. The screw sits in a hollow tube, allowing the pump to raise liquids and granular materials from a low lying supply area. Really, a quick search will show you pictures of what I’m describing, but I think you get it. The device was great for moving grain out of a silo or trough, and also excelled at pumping water.

There are accounts of the ancient peoples before Archimedes’ time using screws for irrigation. Its told in some records that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were kept watered through such means. However, The Greek polymath was the first to on record to have designed one, so it gets his name.

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Britain, 1839. Francis Pettit Smith stands on the deck of the SS Archimedes. The ship, the first of its kind, has been the culmination of a lifelong fixation on boats and propulsion. As a child, Smith would have dreamed of this moment, finally launching a full sized version of one of his models into the sea. But the farmer turned shipwright had yet to prove his invention not only seaworthy, but worthy of the attention of the British Navy.

Smith’s ship, named for the legendary, ancient Greek inventor, had a revolutionary propulsion method. It housed a steam engine, which was nothing new as American Robert Fulton had already invented his steam paddle ship. Smith’s vessel, however, was driven by a screw.

He took Archimedes’ Screw, and figured that, when submerged in water, it would propel itself. He was right. The British admiralty, however, had misgivings, thinking a screw powered ship would be too difficult to steer for an ocean voyage. In September of 1837 he had taken a smaller, test version of the screw ship out to sea. When a storm blew in and dark seas surrounded the Francis Smith, as he had named the tiny, wooden-propellered boat, it kept chugging right along, unfazed by what would normally cause a sailing ship great trouble. Upon witnessing this, seasoned officers in the British Navy showed renewed interest in his invention, prompting the admiralty to request he built a full sized version.

Smith got right to work. He gathered investors and builders, and before too long, the SS Archimedes was launched on October 18, 1838. 125 ft long, 22 ½ feet wide, and weighing 237 tons of English Oak, the boat was built with the sleek, slender lines of a schooner, making it a as beautiful as it was powerful. After a few changes to the machinery and gearing, the ship took its maiden voyage and never looked back. It traveled far and wide, suffered major setbacks, and was put up in trials against some the fastest ships on earth, proving itself swift, capable, and dependable, time and time again. It inspired the design of seafaring vessels for centuries to come, and is seen as one of the most technologically important ships ever built.

However, it was never bought by the Navy. Smith and his company of investors, The Ship Propeller Company, sold it off as a commercial vehicle. From this point, it’s life it’s difficult to find reliable reports on what happened to the SS Archimedes. It ran aground in Beachy Head in 1840. Disappearing and reappearing in public records, usually with less and less of its machinery until after a stop in Sunderland, it was finally stripped of all it’s mechanics and propulsion. It was last heard from in 1864, caught in a storm off of the Port of Rotterdam.

This was to be the final fate of one of the most important ships in history. A faded visage of its former glory, the SS Archimedes was now an old, creaky sailing vessel. Stripped away years ago of the one thing that could have saved her from the storm. A revolutionary propulsion system designed and built by a farmer, and based on an invention from the one of ancient world’s greatest minds.

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Plato, in Book 6 of The Republic, described his ideal leader, the so-called “Philosopher King.” He must be a wisdom seeker, a lover of knowledge, intelligent but grounded enough to prefer a simple life. A complicated leader with few complications. It is widely believed that Plato based these archetypes on his friend, a genius mathematician named Archytas of Tarentum.

Not solely an academic, but also a statesman, Archytas wasn’t just “of” Tarentum, he basically ran the place. The citizens elected him “Strategos,” which is basically a form of military governor. Tarentum had a rule barring successive appointments, but Archytas was so efficient and so beloved that they decided to make an exception, 6 times.

A learned disciple of Pythagoras (you may be familiar with his theorem? A squared plus b squared equals C squared?), Archytas has numerous mathematical proofs and inventions attributed to him. He invented a sort of flying machine, shaped like a dove, which could propel itself from a lower perch to a higher one using a jet of steam. Among those inventions, he is also widely credited with inventing the screw, in wooden form. Because of these achievements, and a lifetime devoted to solving the working mysteries of the world, Archytas is considered the father of mechanical engineering.

Since their invention, wooden screws, with an internally cut thread, were used for early clamps and presses. One of the first widespread applications of the screw was to press grapes for wine. Pliny the Elder, an ancient Roman statesman and historian, tells that screw presses and clamps were in use as early as 60 AD. They started out as wood, but were later manufactured, individually and by hand, from metals such as bronze or silver.

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Screws remained hand-cut until about the late 18th century. Artisans of the time, like Jesse Ramsden, had managed to make lathes to cut screws and screw threads, which allowed them to increase precision and output. However, each machine was different, and so were the screws they put out. Each crafter had a preference for the angle of the thread planes and the shape of the valleys between them. It wasn’t until Henry Maudslay invented the first industrially viable, and widely available screw cutting lathe in 1797, that the fasteners started to become standardized. It was another practitioner of Archytas’ discipline, mechanical engineering, who pushed for the complete standardization of the screw. Sir Joseph Witworth, former apprentice to Maudslay, had taken off to start his own business manufacturing lathes and other machine tools. His machines became famous for their high degree of precision manufacturing. Witworth had high standards, and is often credited with having invented the “thou.” Basically his reputation for exactitude was so widely known, that no one has any trouble believing that he was the first person to work in thousandths of an inch.

In 1841, Witworth became tired of being the only one with standards. In order to repair a product, you had to know what type of screw was used, which company manufactured it, and then had to have the correct replacements on hand. Pieces of engines just fit together better when there’s only one type of screw thread being used. He developed a method of standardization that set the thread angle at 55 degrees with a uniform pitch and shape. It later became adopted nationally, as the British Standard Witworth. Its popularity was due in large part to its adoption by British railway lines, then later, manufacturing, as it streamlined assembly and repair processes, greatly increasing efficiency and reliability of products. Repair work could now be outsourced to specialty shops that only had to stock one type of screw, but could service machines and engines from multiple different manufacturers and companies.

Witworth’s screw design was more efficient, but it’s actual manufacture was not. It required two kinds of lathe and three kinds of cutters. In 1864, a few months before the USS Archimedes ran aground off the coast of Rotterdam, on the other side of the Atlantic, American William Sellers was presenting his invention in a paper delivered at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He proposed a screw thread that had flat roots and crests, making it machinable using just one lathe and cutter. He set his thread angle to 60 degrees, which was easier for machinists and mechanics to cut. As president of the Franklin Institute, Sellers was uniquely positioned to pitch his idea as the new US national standard. The Institute lobbied the US Army, the navy, and the master mechanics of the largest railroads.

Each country having its own standard was well and good until World War II came along and showed that, in the coming age of globalization, an international standard was required. Canada, the US, and Great Britain jointly developed the Unified Thread Standard, with a 60 degree thread profile based on the inch.

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Screws, despite which standard they are manufactured to, all have one thing in common. Just like people who write, produce, and record their own podcasts, they need to be driven. Early on in the industrial revolution, screws were slot headed. A single channel was cut across the head of the screw, into which would fit a flat-headed screwdriver or screw-gun bit.

The two biggest problems with slot head screws is that it takes an extra second or two to properly align your driver head with the screw, and they are extremely susceptible to what is called ”cam-out.” This is when the amount of torque becomes too great and the driver head slips out of the screw head, possibly damaging the work piece, the screw, the driver, and, as in one famous case, the person holding the tool.

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1907, Montreal. Canadian inventor and salesman, P.L. Robertson, is doing a demonstration on a street corner of a spring-loaded screwdriver. It’s not exactly his dream job, but it pays the bills. He had a slew of un-to-minorly successful patents in his design portfolio, but this would prove a fateful day.

While showing the ease with which one can drive a screw with a spring loaded driver, its flat head slipped out of the screw’s slotted head, badly injuring Robertson’s hand. He decided, unsurprisingly, what the world needed was a screw driver that wouldn’t slip out of it’s slot and maim people. He decided upon a square-drive system, which had been used before but never optimized for production. He applied for the patent right away, and received a loan to start his own manufacturing company. Robertson figured out that if he tapered the square slightly, he could cold stamp the recess into the top of the screw with a die, which enabled production on a mass scale. His sales prowess did the rest and the Robertson Screw quickly gained popularity in Canada.

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Henry Ford, one of history’s greatest optimization and efficiency nerds, had a plant manufacturing Model Ts right across the river from Detroit, in Windsor, Canada. Ford noticed this plant was saving $2.60 per car, at what shook out to about 2 hours worth of assembly time. What he discovered, upon investigating, was the Robertson Screws were driven more reliably and quicker than the old slot headed ones. Over the general manufacturing time of the vehicle, the second or two saved per screw by using Robertson’s design, multiplied by the 700+ screws used in the Model T, meant big savings.

Wanting to keep this manufacturing edge all to himself, Ford met with Robertson. Ford wanted to manufacture the screws under a license. Unfortunately, Robertson had already been taken advantage of by foreign investors once, and was reluctant to sign any deal in which he did not control the production of his screws. Both went home empty handed. Robertson continued to expand and grow in popularity in Canada, and the car manufacturers to the South kept using slot headed screws, for a little while, anyway.

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Portland, Oregon, 1935. The deal is sealed and Henry F. Phillips has just purchased a design for a self-centering screw from a local mechanic, John P. Thompson. Thompson had tried and failed to market his design to manufacturing and tool companies. Phillips thought he might be able to do better, given his background in sales and engineering. He was right.

He formed the Phillips Screw Company, patented a modified version of Thompson’s cruciform

design, and right away he was able to convince companies all over the US of its capabilities. Not as protective of his work as Robertson, Phillips licensed his design to just about anyone who was willing to pay. The screw was soon found in hundreds of assembly lines and thousands of products, including the GM assembly plant for Cadillacs and, later, Ford’s plants as well. By 1939, 20 companies worldwide were manufacturing Phillips’ screws, and the Phillips Screw Company grossed a fortune, never having had to manufacture any screws or drivers.

Phillips Head Screws and drivers came to dominate the American marketplace. Eventually finding their way from industrial applications to the homes and toolboxes of handymen, homeowners, and craftspeople. By the middle of the 20th century, it was nearly ubiquitous.

Many driver and screw designs have evolved over the last century or so. And each has their own merits and drawbacks. Despite what a boastful Canadian woodworker, or a 1930s assembly line worker might tell you, there is no perfect screw for every situation. However, thanks to great minds like Archytas and Archimedes, and great entrepreneurs like Phillips and Robertson, the value of the screw is well-known. The simple machine that makes the things we use and the things we make, makeable.

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Until next time, this is Keith Decent saying, later makers.