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Here's the history guy with the story of the screwdriver wars.

Screws as fasteners were not apparently produced until around the 15th century.

Nearly as no mention is in a late 15th century manuscript.

Their initial use was as a fastener for parts of medieval jousting armor and in nearly the same

period for early firearms. The earliest

screwdrivers were built to service these weapons and they were called either a

screw turner or a turn screw and they had a pear-shaped wooden handle and

otherwise looked a lot like a modern flat-headed screwdriver but these

screws and screwdrivers would have been custom made and used on very expensive devices

like wheel locks and jousting armor, and so screws were not for the common folk.

In 1760, brothers Job and William Wyatt of Staffordshire patented a screwmaking machine that

used a file to cut in the threads following the pitch of a lead screw.

This allowed mass production of screws and was a precursor to industrial mass production machines.

The idea of using a lathe of some sort to cut threads was variously improved upon until a process for cold rolling threads was perfected in the 1880s.

But virtually all of these screws used just a few

turning methods, either a hexagon or square that was turned externally or a flat slot cut to turn

internally. And as anyone who has ever used one knows, flat-headed screws and screwdrivers have their

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