The screw came roughly two thousand years before anyone made a screwdriver
The screw was the last of the six classic simple machines to appear, turning up in Assyria between 911 and 609 BC, where King Sennacherib boasted of casting water-screw pumps weighing up to 30 tons. Yet the humble screwdriver for driving fastening screws did not arrive until the late 15th century.
Several simple machines were born in Mesopotamia. The wheel and axle first spun as a potter's wheel in what is now Iraq in the 5th millennium BC, leading to wheeled vehicles early in the 4th. The lever lifted water in the shadoof, the first crane, around 3000 BC, and the oldest signs of pulleys date to early in the 2nd millennium BC. Water wheels appeared in the Persian Empire before 350 BC, possibly the first harnessing of mechanical energy.
Tool use is far older. Because both people and wild chimpanzees use tools, it is widely assumed routine use began before the two lineages split, probably with sticks and plain stones that leave no recognisable trace. Actual stone tools found in Ethiopia are at least 2.6 million years old, and a 2010 study of cut marks suggests Australopithecus afarensis was butchering carcasses with stone about 3.4 million years ago. Bone marks also hint that early humans often scavenged other predators' kills rather than hunting their own.
The Industrial Revolution brought machine tools. Earlier machines relied on wooden frames that swelled and shrank with the weather and whose joints worked loose, and metal was shaped by hand with hammers, files and chisels, so it was used sparingly. Machine tools grew out of devices clockmakers and instrument makers devised in the 18th century to batch-produce small mechanisms, and their precision made interchangeable parts affordable.
Tools can be grouped by job: cutting edges are really wedges, hammers and wrenches move things, rulers and microscopes measure or reveal, welders and glue guns fasten. Many hide second functions. The handle of a typical wood saw is shaped so it can mark 90 and 45 degree angles, and workers joke that nearly any tool can serve as a hammer.
Source: Tool
