Cover design after engraving from Diderot.

Contributions From
The Museum of History and Technology:

Paper 51








Woodworking Tools, 1600–1900

Peter C. Welsh

Peter C Welsh

WOODWORKING TOOLS
1600–1900

In 1918, PROFESSOR W.M.F. PETRIE concluded a brief article on "History in Tools" with a reminder that the history of this subject "has yet to be studied," and lamented the survival of so few precisely dated specimens. What Petrie found so discouraging in studying the implements of the ancient world has consistently plagued those concerned with tools of more recent vintage. Anonymity is the chief characteristic of hand tools of the last three centuries. The reasons are many: first, the tool is an object of daily use, subjected while in service to hard wear and, in some cases, ultimate destruction; second, a tool's usefulness is apt to continue through many years and through the hands of several generations of craftsmen, with the result that its origins become lost; third, the achievement of an implement of demonstrated proficiency dictated against radical, and therefore easily datable, changes in shape or style; and fourth, dated survivals needed to establish a range of firm control specimens for the better identification of unknowns, particularly the wooden elements of tools—handles, moldings, and plane bodies—are frustratingly few in non-arid archaeological sites. When tracing the provenance of American tools there is the additional problem of heterogeneous origins and shapes—that is, what was the appearance of a given tool prior to its standardization in England and the United States? The answer requires a brief summary of the origin of selected tool shapes, particularly those whose form was common to both the British Isles and the Continent in the 17th century. Beyond this, when did the shape of English tools begin to differ from the shape of tools of the Continent? Finally, what tool forms predominated in American usage and when, if in fact ever, did any of these tools achieve a distinctly American character? In the process of framing answers to these questions, one is confronted by a constantly diminishing literature, coupled with a steadily increasing number of tool types.[1]

The literature of the subject, both new and old, is sparse, with interest always centering upon the object shaped by the craftsman's tool rather than upon the tool itself. Henry Mercer's Ancient Carpenters' Tools, first published in 1929, is an exception. It remains a rich source of information based primarily on the marvelous collections preserved by the Bucks County Historical Society. Since 1933, the Early American Industries Association, both through collecting and through its Chronicle, has called attention to the vanishing trades, their tools and techniques; the magazine Antiques has occasionally dealt with this subject. Historians of economic and industrial development usually neglect the tools of the woodcrafts, and when considering the toolmakers, they have reference only to the inventors and producers of machine tools. The dearth of written material is somewhat compensated for by the collections of hand tools in American museums and restorations, notably those at Williamsburg, Cooperstown, Old Sturbridge Village, Winterthur, the Henry Ford Museum, and Shelburne; at the latter in particular the extensive collection has been bolstered by Frank H. Wildung's museum pamphlet, "Woodworking Tools at Shelburne Museum." The most informative recent American work on the subject is Eric Sloane's handsomely illustrated A Museum of Early American Tools, published in 1964. Going beyond just the tools of the woodworker, Sloane's book also includes agricultural implements. It is a delightful combination of appreciation of early design, nostalgia, and useful fact.

Charles Hummel's forthcoming With Hammer in Hand: The Dominy Craftsmen of East Hampton—to be published by the Yale University Press—will be a major contribution to the literature dealing with Anglo-American woodworking tools. Hummel's book will place in perspective Winterthur Museum's uniquely documented Dominy Woodshop Collection. This extensive collection of tools—over a thousand in number—is rich in attributed and dated examples which range from the early 18th through the mid-19th century. The literature of the subject has been greatly enhanced by the English writer, W.L. Goodman. Extending a series of articles that first appeared in the Journal of The Institute of Handicraft Teachers, Goodman has put together a well-researched History of Woodworking Tools (London, 1964), one particularly useful for its wealth of illustration from antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Specialization

Survey the principal printed sources of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The first thing that is apparent is a remarkable proliferation of tool types without any significant change in the definition and description of the carpenter's or joiner's task. Begin in 1685 with Charles Hoole's translation of Johann Amos Comenius' Orbis Sensualium Pictus for use as a Latin grammar. Among the occupations chosen to illustrate vocabulary and usage were the carpenter (fig. 1), the boxmaker (cabinetmaker), and the turner (fig. 2). "The Carpenter," according to Hoole's text, "squareth Timber with a Chip ax ... and saweth it with a Saw" while the more specialized "Box-maker, smootheth hewen-Boards with a Plain upon a Work-board, he maketh them very smooth with a little plain, he boarth them thorow with an Augre, carveth them with a Knife, fasteneth them together with Glew, and Cramp-irons, and maketh Tables, Boards, Chests &c." Hoole repeated Comenius' plates with the result that the craftsman's tools and his work have the same characteristic medieval flavor as the text.[2]

Joseph Moxon in his well-quoted work on the mechanic arts defined joinery as "an Art Manual, whereby several Pieces of Wood are so fitted and join'd together by Straight-line, Squares, Miters or any Bevel, that they shall seem one intire Piece." Including the workbench, Moxon described and illustrated 30 tools (fig. 3) needed by the joiner. The carpenter's tools were less favored by illustration; only 13 were pictured (fig. 4). The tools that the carpenter used were the same as those of the joiner except that the carpenter's tools were structurally stronger. The axe serves as a good example of the difference. The joiner's axe was light and short handled with the left side of the cutting edge bezeled to accommodate one-handed use. The carpenter's axe, on the other hand, was intended "to hew great Stuff" and was made deeper and heavier to facilitate the squaring and beveling of timbers.[3] By mid-18th century the craft of joiner and carpenter had been completely rationalized in Diderot's Encyclopédie and by André Roubo in his L'Art du menuisier, a part of Duhamel's Descriptions des arts et métiers. Diderot, for example, illustrates 14 bench planes alone, generally used by the joiner (fig. 5), while Roubo suggests the steady sophistication of the art in a plate showing the special planes and irons required for fine molding and paneling (fig. 6).

Despite such thoroughness, without the addition of the several plates it would be almost impossible to visualize, through the descriptive text alone, the work of the carpenter and joiner except, of course, in modern terms. This is particularly true of the numerous texts on building, such as Batty Langley's The Builder's Complete Assistant (1738) and Francis Price's The British Carpenter (1765), where building techniques are well described but illustration of tools is omitted. This inadequacy grows. In two 19th-century American editions of British works, The Book of Trades, printed at Philadelphia in 1807, and Hazen's Panorama of the Professions and Trades (1838), the descriptions of the carpenter's trade are extremely elementary.

Thomas Martin's Circle of the Mechanical Arts (1813), although far more thorough than many texts, still defined carpentry "as the art of cutting out, framing, and joining large pieces of wood, to be used in building" and joinery as "small work" or what "is called by the French, menuiserie." Martin enumerated 16 tools most useful to the carpenter and 21 commonly used by the joiner; in summary, he noted, as had Moxon, that "both these arts are subservient to architecture, being employed in raising, roofing, flooring and ornamenting buildings of all kinds" (fig. 7).[4]

In Peter Nicholson's The Mechanic's Companion (figs. 8, 9, and 10), the all-too-familiar definition of carpentry as "the art of employing timber in the construction of buildings" suggests very little of the carpenter's actual work or the improvement in tool design that had occurred since Moxon's Exercises. From Nicholson's list of the tools required by the carpenter—"a ripping saw, a hand saw, an axe, an adze, a socket chisel, a firmer chisel, a ripping chisel, an auguer, a gimlet, a hammer, a mallet, a pair of pincers, and sometimes planes"—there would seem at first glance slight advance since the 1600's. The enumeration of the joiner's tools, however, indicates a considerable proliferation, particularly when compared to earlier writers. By the early 19th century, the more refined work of joinery required over 50 tools.

Reflecting what the text writers listed, toolmakers by the end of the 18th century gave buyers a wide choice. The catalogue of Sheffield's Castle Hill Works offered 20 combinations of ready-stocked tool chests; the simplest contained 12 carpenter's tools and the most complex, 39, plus, if desired, an additional assortment of gardening implements (fig. 11). In 1857, the Arrowmammett Works of Middletown, Connecticut, producers of bench and molding planes, published an illustrated catalogue that offered 34 distinct types that included everything from hollows and rounds to double jointers and hand-rail planes (fig. 12).[6]

American inventories reflect the great increase suggested by the early technical writers and trade catalogues cited above. Compare the content of two American carpenters' shops—one of 1709, in York County, Virginia, and the other of 1827, in Middleborough, Massachusetts. John Crost, a Virginian, owned, in addition to sundry shoemaking and agricultural implements, a dozen gimlets, chalklines, bung augers, a dozen turning tools and mortising chisels, several dozen planes (ogees, hollows and rounds, and plows), several augers, a pair of 2-foot rules, a spoke shave, lathing hammers, a lock saw, three files, compasses, paring chisels, a jointer's hammer, three handsaws, filling axes, a broad axe, and two adzes. Nearly 120 years later Amasa Thompson listed his tools and their value. Thompson's list is a splendid comparison of the tools needed in actual practice, as opposed to the tools suggested by Nicholson in his treatise on carpentry or those shown in the catalogues of the toolmakers.[7] Thompson listed the following:

By 1900, the carpenter's tool chest, fully stocked and fit for the finest craftsman, contained 90 or more tools. Specialization is readily apparent; the change in, and achievement of, the ultimate design of a specific tool is not so easily pinpointed. Only by comparing illustrations and surviving examples can such an evolution be appreciated and in the process, whether pondering the metamorphosis of a plane, a brace and bit, or an auger, the various stages of change encountered coincide with the rise of modern industrial society.

Configuration

Hand tools are often neglected in the search for the pleasing objects of the past. Considered too utilitarian, their decorative appeal—the mellow patina of the wood plane or the delicately tapered legs of a pair of dividers—often goes unnoticed. Surprisingly modern in design, the ancient carpenter's or cabinetmaker's tool has a vitality of line that can, without reference to technical significance, make it an object of considerable grace and beauty. The hand tool is frequently a lively and decorative symbol of a society at a given time—a symbol, which, according to the judges at London's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, gives "indications of the peculiar condition and habits of the people whence they come, of their social and industrial wants and aims, as well as their natural or acquired advantages."[8] The hand tool, therefore, should be considered both as an object of appealing shape and a document illustrative of society and its progress.

On first sight, it is the conformation rather than any facet of its technical or social significance that strikes the eye; perhaps the most decorative of tools are early dividers and calipers which, prior to their standardization, existed in seemingly endless variety. The great dividers used by the shipbuilder and architect for scribing and measuring timbers not only indicate building techniques (accession 61.548) but also document 17th-and early 18th-century decorative metalwork, as seen in figure 13. Well before the 17th century, artists and engravers recognized them as intriguing shapes to include in any potpourri of instruments, either in cartouches or the frontispieces of books (fig. 14).

The two pairs of cabinetmaker's dividers illustrated in figures 15 and 16 suggest significant changes in the design of a basic tool. The dividers shown in figure 15 are English and would seem to be of early 18th-century origin, perhaps even earlier. They are Renaissance in feeling with decorated legs and a heart-shaped stop on the end of the slide-arm. In character, they are like the great dividers shown in figure 13: functional, but at the same time preserving in their decoration the features common to a wide variety of ironwork and wares beyond the realm of tools alone. The dividers pictured in figure 16 are a decided contrast. Dated 1783, they are strongly suggestive of Sheffield origin. Gone is the superfluous decoration; in its place is the strong, crisp line of a tool that has reached nearly the ultimate of function and manufacture, a device which both in general appearance and precise design is very modern in execution. Equally intriguing are the smaller, more slender dividers (accession 319557) of the 18th-century house-builder as seen in figure 18, a form that changed very little, if at all, until after 1850—a fact confirmed by the frontispiece of Edward Shaw's The Modern Architect, published in Boston in 1855 (fig. 19). The double calipers of the woodturner (fig. 20) have by far the most appealing and ingenious design of all such devices. Designed for convenience, few tools illustrate better the aesthetic of the purely functional than this pair of 19th-century American calipers.

Intended to establish proportion and to insure precision, it seems a natural consequence that dividers and calipers should in themselves reflect the same sense of balance and grace that they were designed to govern. Still, even the most prosaic examples of woodworking tools, completely divorced from the quasi-mathematical devices of measure and proportion, have this quality and can be admired solely as decorative objects. This is most evident in the three European bench planes illustrated in figures 21, 22, and 23: one Norwegian, dated 1704; one Dutch (accession 319562), dated 1756; and one German, dated 1809. The Norwegian and German examples, with their elaborately carved bodies and heart-shaped mouths, are typical of the type that Swedish and German colonists in America might have used in the 17th and 18th centuries. They are important for that reason. Also, all three exhibit elaboration found on other material survivals from these countries in their respective periods. For example, the incised rosette of the Dutch plane (fig. 22) is especially suggestive of the rosettes found on English and American furniture of the 1750's and 1760's, specifically on high chests.

The decorative motifs that characterized European tools of the 17th and 18th centuries obscured technical improvement. By contrast, in England and America, tools gained distinction through the directness of their design. Following English patterns, tools of American make were straightforward. Only later, in new tool types, did they imitate the rococo flourish of their European predecessors. In America, as in England, the baroque for things functional seemingly had little appeal. This is particularly true of woodworking planes on which, unlike their continental cousins, embellishment is rarely seen. Exemplifying this tradition are three early 19th-century American planes: a plow, for cutting channels of various widths on board edges, marked "G. White, Phild^a" (fig. 24); a rabbet, for notching the margin of boards; made by E.W. Carpenter of Lancaster, Pennsylvania (fig. 25); and a jack or foreplane, for rough surfacing (accession 61.547), made by A. Klock and dated 1818 as seen in figure 26.