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 nu- 

 merous texts on building, such as Batty Langley's The 

 Builders Complete Assistant (1738) and Francis Price's 

 The British Carpenter (i 765), where building techniques 

 are well described but illustration of tools is omitted. 

 This inadequacy grows. In two 19th-century Ameri- 

 can 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 (181 3), 

 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 

 1 6 tools most useful to the carpenter and 2 1 commonly 

 used by the joiner; in summary, he noted, as had 

 Moxon, that "both these arts are subservient to archi- 

 tecture, being employed in raising, roofing, flooring 

 and ornamenting buildings of all kinds" (fig. 7).* 



In Peter Nicholson's T/ie Mechanic s Companion (figs. 

 8, 9, and 10), the all-too-familiar definition of car- 

 pentry as "the art of employing timber in the con- 

 struction 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 i Goo's. The 

 enumeration of the joiner's tools, however, indicates 

 a considerable proliferation, particularly when com- 

 pared to earlier writers. By the early 19th century, 

 the more refined work of joinery required over 50 

 tools. 



The bench planes [instructed Nicholson] are, the jack 

 plane, the fore plane, the trying plane, the long plane, 

 the jointer, and the smoothing plane; the cylindric plane, 

 the compass and forkstaff planes; the straight block, for 

 straightening short edges. Rebating planes are the 

 moving fillister, the sash fillister, the common rebating 

 plane, the side rebating plane. Grooving planes are the 

 plough and dado grooving planes. Moulding planes 



are sinking snipebills, side snipebills, beads, hollows and 

 rounds, ovolos and ogees. Boring tools are : gimlets, brad- 

 awls, stock, and bits. Instruments for dividing the 

 wood, are principally the ripping saw, the half ripper, 

 the hand saw, the panel saw, the tenon saw, the carcase 

 saw, the sash saw, the compass saw, the keyhole saw, and 

 turning saw. Tools used for forming the angles of two 

 adjoining surfaces, are square^ and bevels. Tools used 

 for drawing parallel lines are guages. Edge tools are 

 the firmer chisel, the mortise chisel, the socket chisel, 

 the gouge, the hatchet, the adge, the drawing knife. 

 Tools for knocking upon wood and iron are, the mallet 

 and hammer. Implements for sharpening tools are the 

 grinding stone, the rub stone, and the oil or whet 

 stone. 5 



Reflecting what the text writers listed, toolmakers 

 by the end of the i8th century gave buyers a wide 

 choice. The catalogue of Sheffield's Castle Hill 

 \Vorks offered 20 combinations of ready-stocked tool 

 chests; the simplest contained 12 carpenter's tools and 

 the most coinplex, 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)/' 



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 1 709, in York 

 County, Virginia, and the other of 1827, in Middle- 

 borough, Massachusetts. John Crost, a Virginian, 

 owned, in addition to sundry shoemaking and agricul- 

 tural 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 a.xe, and two adzes. 



(Continued on page igs) 



' .\taitm. Circle of the Mechanicnl Arts (181 3), p. 123. 

 PAPER 51: WOODWORKING TOOLS, 1600-19 00 



■'■ Peter Nicholson, The Mechanic's Companion (Philadelphia, 

 1832), pp. 31. 89-90. 



>> Catalog, Book 87, Cutler and Co., Castle Hill Works, 

 Sheffield [in the collections of the X'ictoria and .\lbcrt Museum, 

 London]; and Illustrated Supplement to the Catalogue of Bench 

 Planes, .Arrowmammett Works (Middletown, Conn., 1857) [in 

 the Smithsonian Institution Library]. 



185 



