Hand Tools in History

Historical Chronologies

Table of Contents

Historical Paradigms, Chronologies and Schemas

A note on historical schemas and chronologies

Chronology III: Iron and Steel Manufacturing: 1350 - 1865

• The Bessemer Process: The Third Industrial Revolution
• Tool Manufacturing Chronology
• Schema I: Edge Tool Production from Malleable Wrought Iron and Cast Steel (1775 - 1850)
• Schema II: Classification of Iron and Steel

Chronology IV:  The Evolution of the Heat Engine

Chronology V: Woodworking Tools in History

Chronology VI: The Historic Period in Maine

As noted in our introduction to Chronologies I and II, our chronologies are "handy references useful to students, parents, teachers, or curators. Always of questionable accuracy to professional historians, schemas and chronologies are the result of our inevitable pedagogical efforts to make some sense of the confusing relationship between history and artifact." The following chronologies are intended to help in the documentation of the evolution of the manufacturing of hand tools from the stone age to the Industrial Revolution. "Adapt them to your needs; reinvent or redesign them, construct new ones, critique and correct them. Uncovering and understanding the actual sequence of historical events remains one of the most challenging jobs of archaeologists, historians, teachers and students. Perhaps the most important element of this understanding is realizing that absolutely correct sequences or historical chronologies are themselves myths which we invent to help us make sense of disorderly history."

Chronology III: Iron and Steel Manufacturing: 1350 - 1865

For a review of  iron- and steelmaking strategies and techniques before 1350 see Volume 6 of the Hand Tools in History museum publication series and its accompanying bibliography. Almost 4,000 years of ferrous metallurgy precede the first documented forge in North America. The irony of attempting to construct a pedagogical chronology of iron and steel manufacturing techniques is that numerous strategies for producing iron and steel tools were developed before 1300, many of which were used concurrently with more modern technologies all the way to the early years of the 20th century.

The first documented production of iron tools and implements in North America was by the Viking community at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland circa 1025. The Natural History Museum in New York City includes in its display on the L'Anse aux Meadows site clear evidence of a Viking forge on the outer perimeter of the settlement. Nearby bogs supplied the iron ore for this forge, which would have been a primitive hearth type furnace.

Many early colonial farms and settlements included a primitive bog iron furnace. For early settlers, this could have ranged from a primitive earthen fire pit with a hole at the bottom to provide a natural draft to more a sophisticated hearth type furnace. No matter the design, the first iron production in North America was the direct process method where the blacksmith would pull the bloom, a pasty mass of iron, from the fire and begin the process of fashioning iron tools by repeatedly hammering out the impurities and reheating the iron until the desired product was created.

Local supplies of bog iron, however, were quickly depleted in the colonial days in many New England locations except for in southeastern Massachusetts and western Connecticut. The result was a codependency on imported bar iron stock from England, Sweden, Norway, and Russia or from more distant colonial sources outside of New England. Most bar stock was not, however, produced in primitive direct process furnaces but was the result of an Industrial Revolution that utilized larger blast furnaces to produce pig iron (cast iron), which was then reworked first in fineries and later in puddling furnaces into forged iron or was produced as wrought iron in America's numerous large open hearth furnaces and then often refined into bar stock. The two-stage wrought iron production process was necessary because the higher heat of the larger blast furnaces liquefied and carbonized the iron bloom, creating brittle and useless cast iron that had to be reprocessed into useable wrought iron bar stock. In the case of the larger open hearth furnaces, the many impurities in the wrought iron they produced also required further refining before quality forged iron or natural steel tools could be produced. The first commercial forge to utilize this two-step production of wrought iron from blast-furnace-derived pig iron in the United States was the Saugus Ironworks in Massachusetts in 1646. The first and only blast furnace in Maine was established near Katahdin in the mid-19th century. The blast furnace and the open hearth furnace appear to play a nearly equal role in iron production in America until the Civil War, as noted by Robert Gordon in his definitive survey of the history of iron production in America: American Iron, 1607 - 1900. Gordon provides a complete history of iron-making in America from its earliest beginnings in Virginia (1607) and Saugus (1648) to the rapid expansion of colonial iron-making in the Salisbury region of Connecticut, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere after 1710.

Cast steel made its first reappearance in 1742 in England. The production of cast steel and blister steel represents a third stage in iron production. After manufacture of cast pig iron in blast furnaces, pig iron was refined to remove both excess carbon and its many impurities. Henry Cort's improved puddling furnace (1784) produced a much higher quality wrought iron than was previously available via earlier refining processes. It was the availability of this higher quality, nearly pure wrought iron that enabled the widespread practical application of Benjamin Huntsman's crucible steel production process. Production of larger quantities of high quality wrought iron resulted in better quality blister steel, "sheaf" steel (refined blister steel), and crucible steel (cast steel) made from either blister steel or directly from pure puddled iron. The uniform quality of the cast steel produced in the crucibles in England was much superior to blister steel produced from pig iron refined into wrought iron and then made into steel by the tedious cementation process. After Huntsman's reintroduction of cast steel and the florescence of the Sheffield steel industries, imported cast steel tools became increasingly common in the tool kits of late colonial and early Republic artisans, and American blacksmiths were quick to use imported cast steel to produce high quality timber framers' and ship carpenters' edge tools.

It was not until the early 19th century that production of all cast steel tools in the United States was first undertaken. Fisher in The Epic of Steel suggests 1832 as the date of the first known American production of cast steel at Cincinnati, Ohio. Gordon, in American Iron, makes a persuasive case that widespread production of cast steel of the quality produced by English steel makers did not occur in the US until after 1860:

In America, blacksmith produced forged iron, natural, and weld steel hand tools were gradually superseded by factory-made cast iron implements and cast steel edge tools. In the florescence of American tool production, which began in the early 19th century, the steel in the hand tools, which Americans began marketing on a world wide basis, was still manufactured in England before being incorporated in American-made implements. The coming of the full-fledged Industrial Revolution in America was preceded by four decades of remarkable technological innovations and industrial expansion in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and, eventually, in Ohio and other states. The rapid increase in American productivity with respect to its water mills and iron foundries masked its continued dependence on English steel. Once American foundries mastered the art of crucible steel production after 1865, the hegemony of the Sheffield steel industries was rapidly eroded.

The Bessemer Process: The Third Industrial Revolution

The invention of the direct process of steel production on a large scale by Henry Bessemer marks the beginning of the third stage of the Industrial Revolution that forever altered, if gradually, the destiny of edge tool manufacturing in Europe and America. The two decades preceding the Civil War had been characterized by rapidly evolving technological change in America: adaptations of steam power in industry and transportation, expansion of mechanized textile production and the adaptation of mass production techniques using interchangeable parts for gun and machine manufacturing. Among the most important but least visible was the gradual evolution of sophisticated techniques for producing malleable cast iron using small quantities of alloys such as mixed grey cast iron containing graphite flakes, which increased strength and malleability. Use of silicon, manganese, and other alloys in combinations which still remain secret by companies such as the Chaney Plane Company and, later, the Griswold Company, resulted in an explosion of toolmaking strategies in American factories that ushered in the classic period of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Many of the tools and cast iron ware produced in the period from 1850 to 1890 have never been surpassed in quality of durability in the 20th century. The invention of the direct steel manufacturing process by the Englishman Henry Bessemer represents a turning point in industrial production. Combined with mass production of interchangeable parts, this third stage of the Industrial Revolution obliterated the traditional role of artisans in many industrial activities. That this was not the case with the production of high quality edge tools is one of the forgotten footnotes of industrial history.

(Gordon 1996, 223).

The following quotation illustrates the speed and simplicity of the Bessemer process.

Tool Manufacturing Chronology

I.  Direct Processing of Iron Production: Prehistory to 1900

The production of steel in the early years of the Industrial Revolution seems like a very complicated process. It's easy to understand Longfellow's romanticized blacksmith hammering out a steel-edged implement on his anvil. Once the manufacturing of steel-edged tools became a multiple step process, it is more difficult to understand the difficulties encountered by edge toolmakers due to the variable quality of the weld steel available to most blacksmiths. The following schema summarizes the essence of an Industrial Revolution that began with a blast furnace and ended with sophisticated cast steel edge tools and a variety of other malleable iron tools and artifacts. Until the late 19th century, edge tool production in the United States was characterized by two different methods of production, the indirect process from cast iron and the direct process from bloomeries.
 

 
 
 

Schema II: Classification of Iron and Steel

The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is a landmark in western literature in that it summarizes all the knowledge of late Victorian and Edwardian England. Its classification, reprinted below, has several additions by the editor. It is a very simple chart that clarifies a very complicated subject for those who are not trained specialists in the history of technology.
 

Chronology IV:  The Evolution of the Heat Engine: An Ongoing Sketch
Heat Engines: The Energy Sources of our Industrial Activities

In the study of Maine history, context is everything. The history of ancient Pemaquid cannot be told without a basic understanding of European attempts to discover a Northwest Passage to China or the robust market economy that characterized the milieu of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers. The history of Maine, including long forgotten backcountry mill towns, cannot be understood without reference to an Industrial Revolution that began outside of colonial America and developed in Europe and England with little visible impact on the coastal settlements of the ancient dominions of Maine. Perhaps the first signs of this Industrial Revolution were the appearance of cast steel edge tools in the tool kits of Maine's ship carpenters and factory made garments from the water mills of southern New England. The writings of Louis C. Hunter on the origins and growth of industrial power in the United States prompt the following effort to make some sense out of disorderly history, especially that most disorderly of all types of history, the history of technology. While England was suffering from a disastrous decimation of its forests beginning in the Elizabethan era and culminating in the early 18th century and iron production was greatly reduced due to a lack of fuel, colonial America, including Maine, had two great resources that postponed the dirtiest and most obvious aspects of the Industrial Revolution, its rivers and forests. Due to a lack of forest resources, England's manufacturing community quickly became reliant upon coal and then coke to fire its furnaces and newly invented steam engines. America was fortunate to have numerous large rivers in New England to power its watermill-driven factories, which soon equaled and surpassed in efficiency the steam-powered factories in the Midlands of England. In Maine, there was a 30 to 50 year delay before the watermills characteristic of southern New England made their appearance in Saco, Biddeford, Lewiston, and other locations. Maine's rivers were too rocky and too rapid, especially above their tidewaters, for the steam boats that opened the west prior to the proliferation of railroads. In Maine, it was the proliferation of railroads that brought factory-made tools and products of southern New England to the market towns of coastal Maine and gradually eroded the economic basis of the maritime culture of Maine and its two centuries of shipbuilding, codfishing, and coastal and West Indies trading.

A brief sketch of the evolution of the heat engine (see Hunter) and the changes in transportation, hand tools, and representative tool kits that characterized the Industrial Revolution, help us make some sense of what has happened in Maine history.
 

Chronology V: Woodworking Tools in History

In 1964, William L. Goodman, a self-taught carpenter and teacher of woodworking skills in an English boy's school, published the definitive study of woodworking tools in history, History of Woodworking Tools.  Subsequently, Goodman published the first edition of British Planemakers in 1968. Both of these texts are among the most essential references for anyone studying the history of tools and, especially, the history of woodworking tools. Most of the woodworking tools in the tool kits of the shipbuilders, millwrights, house builders, and coopers of Maine's maritime culture utilized tools that followed English patterns and designs. Goodman's History of Woodworking Tools, often cited in various sections of the Davistown Museum website, contains the following schema of when specific woodworking tools made their first appearance. The schema that he constructed and printed in History of Woodworking Tools is reproduced here because it describes the historical evolution of the tool kits of both English carpenters and their colonial and American descendants.
 

Chronology VI: The Historic Period in Maine

Our chronologies and schemas -- our seemingly futile attempt to make some sense of disorderly history -- prompt one more pedagogical indulgence -- the sketching in of a timeline for Maine's historic evolution from a distinctive maritime culture using iron and steel woodworking tools to its submergence in the Industrial Revolution that at first bypassed much of coastal Maine. Twentieth century technology now dominates Maine's cultural existence -- yet what seems at first a cultural obliteration may allow -- via the compatibility of cybertechnology with Maine's craft traditions -- the florescence of a new Maine based upon its greatest assets: natural resources, an unbroken tradition of creative artisans and artists, an interesting history, and a stubborn unwillingness to be subsumed by the banal consumer culture of the late 20th century.

The following chronology is used as a guideline to organize and interpret the tools and artifacts on display in the Museum collection. The following time line traces an approximate technological chronology as it pertains to the settlement of coastal Maine. The history of Maine is different from the history of southern New England, Pennsylvania, or any other region in that there was a broad influx of population to the coast as a part of the great migration between 1630-1650. By 1670, thousands of residents lived in numerous towns and villages throughout the coastal areas of Maine, but King Philip's War (1676) marked the beginning of 80 years of intermittent warfare and resulted in a rapid end to what was the first colonial dominion in Maine. All settlements east of Wells were sacked, burned, or destroyed. Extensive resettlement in the colonial period didn't begin along coastal Maine until approximately 1714. Much of the interior of Maine and the coastal areas east of the Penobscot River remained disputed territory until the fall of Quebec in 1759. The Treaty of Paris (1763) marks a turning point in Maine history; vast tracts of land with rich forest resources suddenly opened to settlement by residents of resource-depleted southern New England. This unique history of coastal Maine dictates the outline of the following schema, which is designed to sketch the technological innovations that led to the Industrial Revolution and then to the rapid but invisible environmental changes that occurred in Maine in the late 20th century.

In constructing the following chronologies, we don't intend to suggest that there were no cast iron artifacts used or produced in Maine between 1500 - 1740. Rather, wrought iron implements dominated the tool kits of the early settlers until the late 18th century when the production of both cast steel edge tools and cast iron implements began appearing in the tool kits of the period. By the mid-19th century, cast iron was the metal of choice in the production of everything from pots to steam and railroad engines and machinery. During this period, cast steel edge tools began replacing forged iron and natural steel tools in the tool kits of Maine woodworkers. After invention of the Bessemer and modern open hearth processes, drop-forged steel tools and artifacts gradually replaced cast steel edge tools and cast iron implements. During and after the Civil War the tool kits of Maine's distinctive maritime culture were gradually replaced by the factory-made tools produced by the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution. The Museum exhibition, "An Archaeology of Tools," illustrates the gradual change in the tool kits of Maine's artisans until the full fledged Industrial Revolution introduced technological changes that obliterated Maine's traditional maritime culture.

Terminology: Maritime Culture versus Industrial Revolution

A problem with terminology obviously occurs in our chronology: Maine's maritime cultures overlap with America's blossoming Industrial Revolution. As noted previously, the Industrial Revolution in Europe really begins with the blast furnaces and florescence of cathedral building in the 13th century. A second period of the Industrial Revolution begins with the rediscovery of cast steel, the development of the steam engine, and the introduction of the reverbatory furnace in England. Just as the golden age of shipbuilding in Maine is just beginning in the late 18th century, the proto-Industrial Revolution is already well underway both in America and, especially, in Europe.

Inovations in the design and construction of industrial machinery following the example of the English Industrial Revolution occurred in New England to the south of the Province of Maine. These include the construction of the first cotton mill in Rhode Island (1790), the first totally automated textile mills at Waltham, Massachusetts (1815), and the rise of the factory system of producing guns and machinery with interchangeable parts (1820 - 1850). Technological change in America occurred so quickly in the years before the Civil War that any chronological divisions are questionable. Yet it is incontestable that the golden years of Maine's maritime culture are the 1840s and 1850s, years that coincide with the period of rapid technological change in America, including the florescence of small then larger edge tool and other manufacturing enterprises in New England.