FACTORALY - E2 TOOLS

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Another week. Another dull subject - that turns out to be anything but. Hitting the nail on the head this time when it comes to tools. From prehistoric stones to modern tech, man's use of tools is what inspired a man in a gorilla suit to throw a space station into the air in an iconic 1968 film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello! Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of Fact orally. We're here to bring you more interesting hopefully interesting yes we thought we could go away and only do a few but actually we have to do a lot more every time we start picking a subject uh it just takes us on this amazing deep delve um we sort of pick out a subject which at first we think, oh, we could probably chat about that for 20 minutes. And then a week later, my goodness me, we've spent, well, Bruce, you told me earlier on, you reckon we could do an entire episode just about a nail. Well, not a nail, but the nail.

Yes, absolutely. The nail as a whole. The nail as a thing. Absolutely. So what are we talking about this week, Bruce? Well, I think we're talking about tools. Yes, I agree. But do you agree that what is a tool, if you'll pardon the expression?

Yes, we need some differentiation here, don't we? Is it something that you use to change the environment around you that isn't you or something? Is that one of the definitions? Right, yes. So valid point. Let's start off with a definition. What is a tool? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a tool is a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function and change the environment around you. Ah, so I must have read that somewhere then.

You must have done that. it's actually in there. Which it's vague, isn't it? You know, you sort of, when we first said let's do a thing about tools, I instantly thought oh that's nice and easy, black and decker, hammers and saws, that's what a tool is. But based on that definition, it is any implement that you can use for any purpose ever. I mean, the first tool, I guess, is a hammer, isn't it? I mean, the first thing that people did was hit stuff.

Yeah, pretty much. So tools go back. I mean, they're old, aren't they? As long as… Well, animals have been using tools. It's not just humans, is it? I mean, animals. There's birds that pick up a rock or use a rock to open i think that is it oyster catchers they use i was going to say it's a snail

or a mollusk or something is yes they they whack against a rock to to open the shell yeah so technically that's using a tool yeah so yes so they've been used since forever. In human terms, the oldest evidence of a tool that I've found is 3.3 million years old. So reasonably old. In Kenya, a few years ago, they found some pieces of rock that were most distinctly hewn and napped to make a cutting edge. What is a nap? A nap is where you... Oh, I was going to use a technical word to describe a technical word there. That doesn't help, does it?

So what's the difference between a rock and a rock that's napped? So a napped rock has had bits chiseled and chipped away from it in a slightly pointy, chamfered manner to make a sharp cutting edge rather than being blunt. As opposed to a bit that's just sort of chipped off or like a bit of slate or something. Yeah. So it's been deliberately hewn into a particular shape for a particular purpose as opposed to, oh, look, I've just picked up a sharp rock it's actually been deliberately carved and you can see it you can see these little hand-sized lumps of rock that are distinctly pointy and and each edge is you know symmetrical so it's it's

you know too much of a coincidence to just be a natural rock um but they also found some larger pieces of rock they found a lump of rock rock that was about 15 kilograms on this particular site. The site is called Lomekwi 3 in Kenya. And they found this 15 kilo lump of rock, which they guess might have been used as an anvil of sorts to sort of hammer one piece of rock against the other on this anvil to make smaller tools. So they've been around for a while and what would those tools have been used for they would have been sort of largely for for cutting and um preparing anything from sort of making clothing to preparing food to i don't know

cutting cutting the the prehistoric lawn. I think I've seen that episode of the Flintstones. Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah. Who doesn't want a dinosaur as a lawnmower? Yeah, I seem to remember that the earliest evidence of man using a tool was that they found the bones of an antelope that had scores on the bones, which proved that somebody had actually chopped the meat off the bone with a tool. So not that the bone was being used as a tool, but it had cuts in it, which meant it had been used on it.

Butchered. Oh, wow. Fantastic. Well, not so fantastic for the antelope. No. Fantastic for the historians. Yes, but then the antelope was probably killed by a whole load of people chucking rocks at it anyway or spirits or something. True, yeah. So we always like to do a bit of etymology.

We've done the definition of tool. The etymology of tool, where the word comes from is really disappointing actually. The word tool comes from the old English word tool meaning an implement that you use to do stuff with. Oh wow that's that's incredible. Isn't that amazing? So tool literally means tool which comes from the word that sounds a lot like tool which literally means tool you're welcome so so okay so so the first ones were were hammers and um and cutting implements i have a theory that the most useful tool ever invented was the needle and still is the needle to some degree.

Because if you think about it, without a needle, you can't make clothes because you need to sew clothes together. But also you can't make spacesuits without needles. Yes, there's a direct correlation there. So there is a direct correlation between the needle that was used to sew animals together to make rudimentary clothing and man walking in space. Wow. Okay, fair enough. I still reckon the most important simple element of a tool is the blade of some form or other.

Even going back to that pointy, sharp rock to cut stuff with, that leads to saws. It leads to weapons of all kinds, spears and arrows and knives and all sorts. Swords. Swords, yeah, everything. But the needle, okay. I wonder what the modern world would look like without a needle well exactly i mean i can see what it would look like without swords because you just hit people over the head with hammers or poke each other with needles or exactly sharp things pointy things rather than than bladed things interesting oh i wonder what the

difference is between a pointy thing and a bladed thing uh is a needle a form of blade ah no it isn't because the blade has to have an edge on a side ah yes because um technically a foil, the fencing sword, is not a blade because it only has a point. Whereas an epee and a saber are bladed weapons because they actually have a sharpened edge. Gotcha. What's an epee? Okay. An epee is like a cross between a foil and a saber. It's, if you look at it, it looks a little bit like a saber,

but it's much thinner. Oh, is it sort of the sort of swords that musketeers would use? Yes. Sort of quite skinny. Yes. Often they have, they're triangular, so they have three blades on them. Yeah, okay. But the difference in the sport is that a foil, you only get a point if you hit somebody with the pointy end.

Whereas a saber, you only get a point if you hit somebody with the slicey bit on the torso. Whereas epee, you get a point if you hit anybody anywhere with any part of the sword. So you can hit them on the head, the foot, that all counts in epee. Right. Have you done this yourself? Yes, I used to teach fencing. Did you? Yes.

Of course you did. If our dear listeners haven't tweaked this yet, Bruce has essentially done every single job and met every single interesting person uh in the world ever and every time we have a chat these things just sort of come up oh yes i once talked fencing oh yes i used to know alan bennett whatever it might be. Yeah. Sorry. It's fun. No, no, it's good.

It's fun. It brings a little bit of class to this otherwise mundane chat. Well, I have used a tool. Have you? I have. I have been known to use a tool. In fact, I have the envy of many a man, as well as owning one of those bright red Snap-on tool cabinets. Yes, I've seen that, yes.

It's a pity that the viewers, the viewers, the listeners can't be viewers because, yeah, your red Snap-on chest is quite a feature on this little Zoom meeting we have here. Tell us what's in your red Snap-on chest. People love my Snap-on. It's generally stuff for tinkering with cars, but there are also many, many, many wide and varied tools in it, ranging

from three different sets of spanners for metric imperial and Whitworth. There's also Japanese metric, I think, as well, different to metric metric metric metric um so i did but i don't have that set fine okay yes and a whole set of allen you know proper allen keys with oh great yes and various multi multifarious screwdrivers and of course hammers and and and which gets us back very nicely to where we were. So this interested me. I was wondering what the most prolific, the most popular, the most frequently purchased tool of the modern era is.

And I was sort of looking around various different reports on the world market of hand tools, which is an absolute rabbit hole. Don't even look at it because you will spend hours down there. What would you suggest is the most popular, the most often purchased, the biggest grossing tool? Is it the screwdriver? It's not. I thought it was going to be the screwdriver as well. I thought of all the tools that everybody owns, the screwdriver is up there. It's really not. It's about the fifth most popular hand tool, or at least the fifth most grossing in terms of sales hand tool. Is it a Stanley knife?

Nope. Blades, see? Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah. Stanley invented the utility blade, the Stanley knife. Did he? Yes. Ah.

He also invented the power lock tape measure. Oh, brilliant. So before that, you like pull it pull out the tape measure and then just go straight back in or yeah you'd use a like one of those uh bits of wood with lots of joints in it to measure up yes i know yes yes so yeah the power the power lock tape measure i love that that can be attributed to in fact is the tape measure one of the things that people i suppose people keep them for no that was nowhere that was nowhere on the list at all i'll put you out of your misery it is actually as we've already spoken about hammers aha so the global hammer market um is currently worth about 3.5 billion dollars wow and is that all hammers so that's everything from

tack hammers and claw hammers yes exactly so it's not it's not just the sort of quintessential claw hammer that we we all have at home it's it's anything from hammers to mallets to um whatever you can hit a thing with and call it a hammer um the second is spades and shovels 1.8 it does yeah but then again i mean not everybody has a garden no um that must just show how many gardeners there are out there who garden on behalf of other people no that doesn't even make sense or who garden so hard that they break through a lot of yes yes it could be that and i suppose once you take into consideration the the building trade and oh yes i suppose i was just thinking it's not just extreme gardening in my same vein as extreme ironing and stuff so the global spade and shovel market is worth 1.8 billion dollars

and then it suddenly drops down to hand saws at 700 million dollars um but yeah so hammers hammers are right up there at the top who'd have thought wow well i suppose there are you know many many different hammers there are I suppose I must own five different... Hang on. I've got two claw hammers, tack hammer, mallet, nylon hammer. Two claw hammers, one rubber mallet. And a very strange multi-tool that has a hammer in it. So, yes, I've got five hammers.

And a very strange multi-tool now multi-tool i'm glad you said multi-tool i did a bit of poking around multi-tools um i've i've got a few multi-tools like a leatherman or something like that i've got a i don't even know what the brand is actually it's probably just generic but little things fold out of it and it's got a screwdriver-y bit. Oh, like a Swiss Army knife, but sort of for tools. Like a Swiss Army knife. So that led me into looking at Swiss Army knives, which is a whole topic in itself. And I discovered that there were actually Roman Army knives.

The Swiss Army knife concept wasn't invented by the Swiss, but the Romans. Of course. Of course. Of course. What did the Romans ever do for us? In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, there is an item on display, which it's instantly recognizable as an army knife, except that it's Roman. And it's made out of a combination of iron and silver. And it's exactly what you'd think from an army knife. It has folding compartments. It's bigger than a Swiss army knife, it's several inches long, but it has a fold-away knife, fork, spoon, pick, spatula and spike and they reckon that the

spike was used for opening clams and seafood and and things like that so it's the roman spork the roman spork romans invented the spork there you go we have it on record but it's really it's instantly recognizable it really does look like a multi-tool but a bit bigger and a bit more cumbersome. And therefore we assumed this was a standard issue in the Roman army. Wow. Isn't that great? That's brilliant. I suppose Romans invented a lot of tools for war,

but you don't really think about the domestic tool no i suppose i i sort of think of the the engineering elements that you know whenever the romans conquered a place and then moved on to another place they they built some some jolly fine straight roads and therefore they must have had shovels and pickaxes and and things like that to to do that with um so i guess that kind of makes sense yes of course yes and then we hit the dark ages yes where there were no tools and no manufacturing and no all the roman all the roman good good stuff the romans put in was all demolished and and turned into other things yes well done dark ages ah well yeah i mentioned before i mean hammers obviously you use a hammer to um to knock in a quite a lot of the time to knock in a nail and we did talk about how how many different sorts of

nail there were and how what uses nails were in fact i discovered something which i never which is obvious but i never actually realized that if you know anybody called nailer there was actually a profession which was the person who made nails and that person was called a nailer. A nailer. That makes sense. And they were originally made by blacksmiths, and they used like a heated iron rod, and then they chopped it into bits and sharpened it up and made a head for it. Okay.

And nails were really, really valuable. Nails were like currency. You could actually, you know actually buy and sell nails. And the Romans, I think, made huge quantities of nails. When they left, they left Scotland in about 86 AD. And they left behind seven tons of nails. Good grief. When they left.

In the items that they nailed or just loose? Loose. Huh. Loose nails. When they evacuated the fortress of Inchtutil in Perthshire. Right. Seven tons. Crikey.

Yeah. That's a lot of nails, isn't it? That is really a lot of nails. I know. yeah that's a lot of nails isn't it that is really a lot of nails i know i know and and um i think that one of the reasons we call pennies pennies is because um a penny was the price of a hundred nails oh really yes they were they were so rare i think in america they were so rare when the colonists arrived that people used to take them with when they moved house and if they couldn't get them out of the house when they moved house they would burn the house down and then go through the ashes looking for nails so they could take them on to the next place and

they actually had to bring in laws to stop people from this practice of burning their house down to get the nails out. That's brilliant. But in carpentry terms, houses or structures or whatever they were used to be put together by just joining the bits of wood, which is why you get joiners and joinery. So you'd sort of have dovetail-shaped bits of wood that fit into each other and just fit so snugly and so securely that they wouldn't have needed nails. And I'm just picturing a certain era of architects going,

we don't need these newfangled nails. Modern rubbish. Well, there are people who still build stuff. There are carpenters and joiners who pride themselves on the fact that they make stuff with no nails in it whatsoever. Which reminds me that there is actually a huge building in London

which has been built with absolutely no nails in it whatsoever. None at all. No nails. None at all. And it's vast. It's a Hindu temple, and it's near Ikea in Brancroce. And as you go down a road, you kind of see this thing in front of you that looks like the Taj Mahal. It is amazing.

And it's built of, like, thousands of tons of marble, this thing, and wood. And there are no nails in it at all anyway gosh god that's an engineering feat isn't it they weren't they didn't just use that spray on sticky stuff no nails did they they i think they used very old technology to make sure that everything fitted absolutely perfectly which is ironic given that it's around the corner from ikea oh that's great what a piece of irony imagine the uh the instruction manuals that came to put the temple together i vaguely remember that they they bought the the limestone and marble and stuff in europe shipped it to india to have it cut and then shipped it back to the UK to assemble it into this huge great temple. Wow. It's quite something.

Definitely. If you ever come to London, A, go and visit Ikea. It's an experience. But also, as you're at Ikea, just walk up the road, and you will see the most amazing sight that you would never expect to see in the middle of London. Brilliant. There we go. You're not only getting interesting facts, you're getting tourism guide tips as well. tools to my mind bring up images of diy how are you at diy bruce you've obviously you've got a snap-on chest full of tools are you good at using them around the house i i have been known to assemble stuff and put up shelves and actually build um stuff from scratch. So yes, I can. Excellent. I'm average at DIY. There are some things I can do

quite easily. There are simple things that I really struggle with. But by default, I'm the only one in the household who stands even a chance of being able to do it. Therefore, it is my role. You're the nominated DIYer. Indeed, yes. So now I remember my dad using Black & Decker tools left, right and center. It was like they were the only brand that he was. Only power tools. The only brand of power tools that he was into. Keep your Bosch and your whatever else. But that was what he went with.

And I didn't realize Black & Decker were an American company. Yes. In fact, they own Stanley as well now. Do they? Yes. Black & Decker were the ones who invented and patented the handheld electric drill, specifically with a pistol grip and trigger switch. Wow.

Which is exactly what I think of when I think of an electric drill. And this was relatively earlier on. They patented this thing back in the 1930s. Wow. How that actually looked and worked back then, I'm not entirely sure. But yeah. The handheld drill.

The handheld drill specifically with the... And now knowing that they're an American company, I thought they were English, describing it as having a pistol grip and a trigger switch. It's sort of... Yeah. It kind of this is the this is what you're used to uh fellow americans so yes let's make it let's make it this shape but the the the workmate was was something that was actually was so revolutionary as a way of actually holding stuff while you were while you were sawing it or screwing it or whatever you were doing on it. And when they first came out, I remember being very, very impressed with what it was.

These days, an old one feels slightly flimsy. As an aside, when I bought my first property, I didn't have any furniture and I actually had a black and deccker workmate as my dining table oh whilst other people were using their dining table as their black and decker or building their building their dining table using their black and decker workmate yes the last thing i just wanted to have a look at um we've we've started a bit of a trend at looking at records around various things, the biggest, the fastest, the smallest. Oh, yes. Whatever. Yes.

So what records have you found for us? So again, these are going to be slightly controversial because they have a slightly loose interpretation of what is a tool. But if you'll sort of bear with, the largest tool is a hydraulic cylinder created for a Japanese dredging barge in 2015. This hydraulic cylinder extends up to 66 feet in length and weighs 200 metric tons. So whether we want to call that a tool or a piece of machinery or whatever is sort of up for debate, but that's pretty big. I then looked at the complete opposite, the world's smallest power tools. Now there's a YouTuber from Spain called Enos Camere, and he's got a thing about making things in miniature. He sort of creates dollhouses and miniature items. and he created a power drill and a circular saw at 1 12th scale

and they work I wouldn't necessarily trust the saw Where would you find a brushless motor for something that small? It's incredible have a look it up on YouTube and he's made this little, he's made a replica Makita power drill which looks exactly

like the real thing but it's about one inch so they've got biggest and smallest well there you go biggest and smallest yeah exactly and then one last little record again i sort of went um i started looking at drills don't know why drills fascinate me um but um i started looking at drills. And in Russia, near the Russian-Norway border, built all the way back in the 1970s, they started drilling a hole in the ground for geophysical research purposes, not to get oil or water or anything, but just for research purposes. And this drill, they managed to drill a hole into the earth which reached a record depth of 12,262 metres. Metres?

Metres. Wow. I can't even picture what that looks like, but the bottom of this hole is the deepest artificial point on earth. Blimey. So there you go. That's fantastic. that's a really long hole isn't it how many miles is that that's roughly seven and a half miles sorry this thing

is seven and a half miles deep that the hole that has been drilled by this thing is seven and a half miles so that means that some that to get down that far they have to have dropped the drill down seven and a half miles yeah so i think it's one of these devices where you sort of drill to a certain depth and then you put an extension on the top of the drill and drill a bit more so there's a there's a whole seven and a half miles long that's going round yeah i guess so yeah yeah truth that's um it's a big drill isn't't it? That is crazy. Yeah. Well, thank you, Simon.

That is brilliant. That is an excellent, that's worth listening to the podcast for. Brought that there just for you. I thought you'd like that. After a fact like that, there's nothing else to do but end the podcast, I think. Yes, I think that's a podcast ending fact. Yes. That's a mic drop

and as voiceovers we never do that it would cost way too much indeed well thank you everyone I think we're up to at least three listeners now so thank you to all three of you for listening to us

droning on about tools and if you have tools, go and use them. Yes. It's good for your mental health. It is excellent for your mental health. Unless they stress you out, in which case get someone else to do it. Or unless you cut your finger off, which is bad for you. Yeah.

So if you enjoy this sort of chit-chat, then please join us again next week where we will find another equally mundane topic to find some fascinating facts from and don't forget to do all that usual podcasty stuff of liking subscribing sharing and commenting if you like why not yeah drop some comments tell us what your personal experiences are with with tools either positive or negative exactly and uh we will see you all next time. Cheerio.

Bye-bye.