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A hand-forged adjustable wrench from the early s
A monkey wrench is a type of smooth-jawed adjustable wrench, a 19th century American refinement of 18th-century English coach wrenches. It was widely used in the 19th and early 20th century. It is of interest as an antique among tool collectors and is still occasionally used in practice.
More broadly, a monkey wrench may be a pipe wrench or any other kind of adjustable wrench.[1]
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Monkey wrench (left) compared to Stillson or pipe wrench (right)Adjustable coach wrenches for the odd-sized nuts of wagon wheels were manufactured in England and exported to North America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were set either by sliding a wedge, or later by twisting the handle, which turned a screw, narrowing or widening the jaws. In , Loring Coes, a knife manufacturer in Worcester, Massachusetts, invented a screw-based coach wrench design in which the jaw width was set with a spinning ring fixed under the sliding lower jaw, above the handle. This was patented in [2] and the tools were advertised and sold in the United States as monkey wrenches, a term which was already in use for the English handle-set coach wrenches.[3] Published reports from and show the term in use (and indicating by the absence of explanatory glosses that the term was not unfamiliar).[4]:&#;42&#;[5]:&#;211&#; The origin of the name is not entirely clear, but Geesin ()[6] reports that it originated in Britain with a fancied resemblance of the wrench's jaws to that of a monkey's face, and that the many convoluted folk etymologies that later developed were baseless.[6] Before the Bahco/Johansson/Crescent type became widespread in the United States, during the industrial era of the s to the s, various monkey wrench types were the dominant form of adjustable wrench there. During that era, a very wide and popular range of monkey wrenches was manufactured by Coes family partnerships, licensees and companies, which filed further wrench patents throughout the 19th century. Some Coes wrenches could be bought with wooden knife handles, recalling the company's earlier knives. In , the Coes Wrench Company advertised a six-foot-long "key" wrench, shaped like a monkey wrench, for use on railroads.[7][8] The Coes wrench designs were acquired by the toolmaker Bemis & Call of Springfield, Massachusetts, in . After , its successor companies manufactured monkey wrenches from Coes designs until the mid-s, a production run of over 120 years.[3][9][10]
In German Language the wrench is called "Engländer" which means "Englishman". It is thought to be called so because for the less common imperial ("English") screws and nuts in continental Europe when only metric open-end or ring wrenches were available.
Monkey wrenches are still manufactured and are used for some heavy tasks, but they have otherwise been mostly replaced by the shifting adjustable wrench/spanner, which is much lighter and has a smaller head, allowing it to fit more easily into tight spaces, and the tooth-jawed, torque-gripping pipe wrench.
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The following story was widespread from the late 19th and early 20th centuries:
That handy tool, the "monkey-wrench", is not so named because it is a handy thing to monkey with, or for any kindred reason. "Monkey" is not its name at all, Charles Moncky, the inventor of it, sold his patent for $, and invested the money in a house in Williamsburg, Kings County, where he now lives.[11][12]
Although this story was refuted by historical and patent research in the late 19th century,[3] it appears to have been inspired by a real person. A Charles Monk (not Moncky) lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the s where he made and sold moulder's tools, not mechanics' tools like a monkey wrench.[13] He could not have invented or named the monkey wrench because he was born after the term first appeared in print.[13]
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A story on social media claims that the African-American boxer Jack Johnson invented the wrench while in prison, and the wrench was named "monkey wrench" as a racial slur. However, both the first patent for a monkey wrench and the name predate Johnson's birth. Johnson did, however, receive a patent for improvements to it.[14][15]
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The largely US idiom "to throw a monkey wrench into..." means to sabotage something, equivalent to the British English "to throw a spanner in the works". A "left handed monkey wrench" is sometimes used as ironic humor, as monkey wrenches are ambidextrous.
Cpl. Adrian Shephard, protagonist of Gearbox Software's and Valve Software's Half-Life: Opposing Force, wields a monkey wrench as his primary melee weapon. Similarly, the Engineer class in Team Fortress 2, also published by Valve, uses a monkey wrench as his base melee weapon.
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A couple of the tools were labelled &#;Stillson.&#; &#;What&#;s a Stillson?&#; I asked myself. A little digging revealed not a what but a who &#; Daniel Stillson was an engineer at J.J. Walworth & Co., the Boston company that brought steam heating systems to the world in the s. It had to create much of what it needed to build these systems, such as valves and fittings and radiators and, 150 years ago, Stillson&#;s pipe wrench.
For a few weeks, my hobby became scouring the Internet for tips on how to restore old tools. I acquired brass brushes, steel wool, sandpaper, the fixings for vinegar baths. As the rust came off, words appeared &#; &#;Walworth,&#; &#;Trimont,&#; &#;Coes&#; &#; companies I&#;d never heard of, though they were based in Boston, Roxbury, and Worcester. Little did I know I was uncovering Boston&#;s essential role in bringing us that great, if underappreciated, pillar of modern life: indoor plumbing.
THE THINGS WE DISCOVER in basements we&#;d usually rather not. But the rusty old tools left behind by previous owners in the cabinets downstairs seemed like they might have a purpose. When my son got interested in carpentry, I decided to clean them up and give them to him.
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DANIEL STILLSON WAS BORN in Durham, New Hampshire, in . He went to work in the Charlestown Navy Yard, and was pressed into service as a ship&#;s mechanic during the Civil War, serving briefly on the ship of David Farragut, the US Navy&#;s first admiral. After the war, he moved back to Charlestown and went to work at Walworth&#;s factory in Cambridge.
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In the mid-19th century, there was no more exciting place to work in the plumbing industry than Boston. Historically, most municipal water supplies in the United States were limited and private, says Carl Smith, historian and author of the book City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. Yet as America&#;s towns were growing into cities, they began outstripping and sometimes building over their water supplies. Cities scrambled to get the water they needed, waterworks were their answer. But who should provide these and pay the substantial development cost? Private interests or the government?
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The debate over who should pay raged hottest here &#;because it&#;s Boston!&#; Smith says, because the citizenry of the day took seriously questions of how society should work. &#;They cared about this stuff. They cared a lot about principle, and the meaning of what they were doing.&#;
The debate started during Mayor Josiah Quincy III&#;s term in , and was finally resolved in when his son Josiah Quincy IV was mayor, when citizens voted to bring water from Framingham&#;s Long Pond (now Lake Cochituate) to Boston. This would require an entirely new &#; and uncommonly sturdy &#; infrastructure. As for paying for it, Boston became an early adopter of the newly developed municipal bond, Smith says.
Early plumbing used wooden pipes. This piece of Boston&#;s first such system, installed near what is now the Fort Point Channel, is on display at The Plumbing Museum in Watertown.
Michael Fitzgerald
Massachusetts became the most industrialized state in the country, Smith says, driven in part by the installation, maintenance, and repair of the water infrastructure. Wooden pipes were being replaced by longer-lasting metal pipes. As pipe standards emerged, there was a need for new sorts of tools.
Springfield was an early center of wrench innovation &#; in , Solyman Merrick patents the first wrench, with jaws that can be adjusted by turning a screw. In , Loring Coes, another Springfield resident, improves on Merrick&#;s wrench by making it possible to adjust the jaws with one hand. But these stiff tools with their smooth jaws could slip on circular metal pipes. Enter Daniel Stillson.
LEFT: The Walworth Manufacturing Co. made several versions of the Stillson wrench. This one is a 10-inch model. MIDDLE: This adjustable screw wrench from A.G. Coes & Co. in Worcester was typical of American wrenches before the invention of the Stillson. RIGHT: A modern-day pipe wrench. Changes have been minor over the last 150 years.
Bruce Peterson for the Boston Globe
Stillson &#;had unusual mechanical ability,&#; wrote Orra L. Stone in his History of Massachusetts Industries. He envisioned a tool made expressly for round metal pipe. Its jaws would have angled teeth facing opposite directions, allowing them to grip more effectively than its predecessors. The head would be loose, which would help it clamp down ever more tightly on a pipe when a worker turned its handle, but also easily release.
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Stillson whittled the first prototype of his new pipe wrench out of wood, and brought it into work. His bosses were intrigued, and had him get the company&#;s workshop to make a steel version of it, then prove it was strong enough to tear a 1 ¼-inch pipe. As the story goes, Stillson, who had a sailor&#;s penchant for profanity, swore roundly before going off to test the wrench. He came back with the broken pipe and the wrench intact. It worked.
It might stun modern capitalists to know that Walworth&#;s management made Stillson patent the device, and refused to buy the patent from him even for the rock bottom price of $1,500. Instead, C.C. Walworth, brother of Walworth manufacturing&#;s founder, who had invented a number of advances in indoor heating, including the Walworth radiator, insisted that Stillson own the wrench and merely license it to the company. Eventually, Stillson acquiesced. Walworth&#;s benevolent capitalism would be fruitful for Stillson, who would make at least $67,000 from his license, about $1.9 million in today&#;s dollars.
The Stillson wrench emerged at a time when pipes and other industrial equipment were proliferating into daily life, and &#;you need tools,&#; says Marc Greuther, chief curator at The Henry Ford, a Dearborn, Michigan-based collection of museums and historical parks. The Stillson wrench&#;s adjustable jaws can grip pipes and fasteners, combining both accuracy and flexibility. Greuther says its value stems from its versatility: It allowed plumbers to use a single tool to &#;tackle things that are already worn or abused, as opposed to having to carry around many, many individually dimensioned wrenches.&#; By way of illustration, he adds, &#;I&#;ve used Stillsons to work on locomotives.&#;
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The Stillson wrench was so popular that its name became synonymous with the tool, the way Kleenex or Google are now. As Stone wrote, it became &#;America&#;s Most Famous Tool.&#;
A trade magazine ad for the Stillson wrench.
EVERY HUMAN SOCIETY makes tools and is remade by them, says Matilda McQuaid, the co-curator of a exhibition Tools: Extending Our Reach at New York&#;s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Tools are functional, yet also transcend mere usefulness.
The Stillson wrench remained fundamentally unchanged, but innovation proceeded. In October , Alexander Graham Bell was in Walworth&#;s offices at 69 Kilby Street in Boston when he made the first long-distance &#;acoustic telegraph&#; call outside of a laboratory. He spoke to his associate for some three hours using the telegraph wire between the office and Walworth&#;s factory, 2 miles away in Cambridge.
When the Walworth patent expired other toolmakers sought to take advantage of its popularity, copying its features and sometimes even its name. One of the wrenches I cleaned up looked like a Stillson, but turned out to be a Roxbury-made &#;Trimo&#; wrench from Trimont. Another, from the Oswego Tool Company, had the name Stillson on its wrench. Both of those companies are long out of business, which was no surprise to me. As a native of the industrial Midwest, New England&#;s 19th century mills, massive for their day, look quaint compared to&#;U.S. Steel&#;s Gary Works, which stretches for 5 miles along Lake Michigan. Ford&#;s River Rouge plant, dubbed &#;the most famous factory in the world,&#; sits on land 1.5 miles by 1 mile. I once was in a steel mill in South Chicago that was part of 6 square miles of steel plant &#; imagine if all of Dorchester were a factory.
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It&#;s hard to imagine what might replace these behemoths if they die, but history in Boston accumulates in layers. Walworth&#;s factory in Cambridge was originally a horse-drawn carriage producer. Walworth moved its factory from Cambridge to Boston in . In , Edwin Land took over the Cambridge space and began making the world&#;s first instant camera. Similarly, the Trimont factory in Roxbury now has two health care companies in it, plus some space for lease.
Walworth&#;s factory at 706 Main Street near the Charles River in Cambridge circa .
From Cambridge Historical Commission
Walworth itself left Boston in the s for Texas, conceivably because manufacturing costs were cheaper. In the early s, a group of investors bought it and relocated it to Mexico.
After his license deal, Stillson moved to Somerville, near the top of Winter Hill. He kept working for Walworth. By the time of his death in , he had earned licensing fees of as much as $100,000, equal to about $3 million today. His widow razed their house to build another one&#;teardowns are not just a thing of our times.
But Stillson&#;s wrench has endured for 150 years. Wrench makers don&#;t put the name Stillson on their tools anymore, but search for &#;Stillson wrench&#; online and you&#;ll get new pipe wrenches that look very similar to the Stillsons I cleaned up in my basement.
It turns out, though, that carpenters don&#;t make furniture with pipe wrenches. So my son won&#;t need it in his intended craft. Unless maybe he can use it as a hammer.
Jeremiah Manion of the Globe staff contributed research to this story.
This story has been updated to reflect that The Plumbing Museum is in Watertown.
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EnterMichael Fitzgerald can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter @riparian.
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