One good turn : a natural history of the screwdriver and the screw / Witold Rybczynski

Includes bibliographical references and index

When editors at The New York Times Magazine were designing millennial issues and wanted a viable answer to the query, they turned to Witold Rybczynski - renowned social and architectural historian, author of Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World, a man who built a house by hand. Rybczynski's quest to identify the tool that changed the course of civilization became a story of mechanical discovery and genius as illuminating and engaging as Dava Sobel's Longitude. One Good Turn tells the tale of the screwdriver and the screw. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a machine for carving wood screws and the rest is delightfully compelling history. Rybczynski demonstrates exactly how, without screws, there would be no telescope, no microscope - in short, no enlightenment science - and why the Industrial Revolution would still be waiting in the wings. The screwdriver, perhaps the last hand-tool in a world gone cyber, represents nothing less than the triumph of precision and mass production.

Englsih.