When you look around your toolbox or toolkit, have you ever wondered about how the tools were invented?  We all use them, some use them much better than others. In the book, One Good Turn – A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski, HarperCollins, NY, 2000, some of these questions are answered. Mr. Rybczynski discusses many of the tools in the toolbox and their history and settles on the story about the screwdriver and the screw as one of the best tool of the 1900’s. In turns out there is very good reasons why the screw and screwdriver is a great product of the 1900’s, they are very hard to design and it took great knowledge to do so.  If you look around, the screw is a very useful tool and every home has many of them in use and that is why we would think it must have been an early invention. The problem was to mass produce them was next to impossible – in the early days – much of the work was done by hand which meant the price was high and some were great, others were not so or the consistency was not good and carpenters worked around them. It was not until 1800s before good screws were efficiently produced. It took another 50 years before they were produced with a point and another 100 years before they were produced with the distinctive cross, prior to that the screws were produced with the straight line on the top. The ones with the distinctive cross called a Phillips stay on the screwdriver longer which means the operator has more control and is more efficient. Who is the father of the screw – the great mathematician Archimedes.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the distinctive cross was invented by a man named Robertson who wanted to control his invention form selling to manufacturing. The Phillips was invented by a man named Phillips who licensed his invention to anyone who wanted to sell and manufacture it. In this case, Robertson lost the contract to the auto companies, Phillips was the alternative and became the standard. This is the big problem with inventors – those who want to control versus those that want to license their invention. Dividend paying companies can scale up faster, better and make more money than most inventors. Inventors tend to see it as their baby and want to be involved, whereas in the company it is one more product to be offered to the consumer.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions