Who invented nuts and bolts

In the eighteenth century, screws evolved again when Antoine Thiout, a French clockmaker, attached a screw drive to a lathe, enabling tool carriages to move semi-automatically. No one quite agrees on the origin of nuts and bolts, though we believe they came after the screw thread.

What we do know is that they came into prominence during the Industrial Revolution, and their most notable process innovations have occurred within the last years. For example, the U. Fast forward to the last twenty years, and fastener design developments have moved even faster, thanks to the introduction of nickel-based alloys.

When machinists used cast iron and cruder forms of steel, square bolt heads were easier to make. As machinery became smaller and more compact, however, the hex-head bolt evolved to meet the need for more compact bolt heads.

In James Nasmyth, an assistant to Henry Maudslay, designed a pioneering milling attachment for Maudslay's bench lathe to make a large batch of hex-head bolts for a scale model they were building for the London Science Museum. By the s, cold-heading machines became available for stamping metal.

It took until the s, when Bessemer steel mills began producing the new mild steel in accurate thicknesses and quantity, before cold-heading machines began punching out hex nuts. This innovation meant that nuts stamped from flat metal stock and machined to exact tolerances could be screwed onto bolts made by the new screw-making machines in mills anywhere in the country. Larger hex nuts quickly replaced square bolt heads in heavy industrial applications.

The two great wars of the 20th century, the equipping of massive armies and the maintenance of that equipment forced even greater standardization on the manufacturers of war material. The humble hex-head bolt and nut fastener system became essential not only to the war effort, but to virtually every aspect of modern life.

It was constructed from wood and was used for land irrigation and to remove bilge-water from ships. The Romans applied the Archimedean screw to mine drainage. The construction of the screw thread depended upon the eye and skill of the craftsman.

Advances on this occurred in the eighteenth century. Antoine Thiout, around , introduced the innovation of equipping a lathe with a screw drive allowing the tool carriage to be moved longitudinally semi-automatically.

Screws with fine pitches are essential in a wide variety of instruments - such as micrometers. To construct such a thread a lathe was essential.

Jesse Ramsden in made the first satisfactory screw-cutting lathe. Using his lathes a long screw cut be cut from a carefully cut small original.