"Nuts and Bolts" by Roma Agrawal --A Review by Susan Price

Nuts and Bolts by Roma Agrawal

 I could say this book is 'interesting', 'fascinating', 'absorbing'... It is all of those things.

It's also an absolute delight. 

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and it's not only taught me a lot, but also made me think a lot-- Oh, about history, and the gob-smacking ingenuity of all people, everywhere, at all times. How, from the Stone-Age (and before), they've observed, applied, invented...

I mean, how did anyone come up with the idea of melting metal out of rocks? Or of using the power contained in a bendy branch to make a bow and arrow? If I think about it for too long at a time, it makes me dizzy.

The author, Roma Agrawal, studied engineering at Imperial College, London, and physics at Oxford. She worked on the Shard. So, she knows what she's talking about. And her love for her subject is evident in every word.

The subtitle is 'How Tiny Inventions Make Our World Work' and her first chapter is on 'The Nail.' As she points out, nails are everywhere-- in our furniture, in our shoes, in our buildings. I bet, like me, you've never given them much thought -- but as Roma Agrawal points out, 'the act of joining two things was once radical.'

The oldest nails were bronze and were first used in Egypt about 5000 years ago. As those first nails were bashed in, it was a step towards the Shard-- and the International Space Station. 

Roma Agrawal

Agrawal goes into the physics of why nails are good at joining things together -- and how they got even better when, first, it was discovered how to smelt iron, and then how to make iron into steel. And then there's the progression from hand-made nails, bashed out on an anvil, to the mass-production of millions of identical nails by machine.

Simple nails underlay the Roman Empire and the Industrial Revolution. There's an awful lot of human history and politics in a simple little nail.

From the nail, the book moves on to the even more impressive physics and fixing power of the screw -- and then the next chapter is about The Wheel.

Well, of course there's a chapter on the wheel, because everyone is always banging on about wheels and 're-inventing the wheel.'

Agrawal reminds us that we have constantly re-invented the wheel. She points out that electric toothbrushes and ball-point pens, among many, many other things, only work because of wheels. And the wheel wasn't even invented, in the first place, to solve transport problems. Its first use was, almost certainly, as a potter's wheel. Instead of having to laboriously shape pots from coils of clay, wheels made it possible to 'throw' pots.

However, once someone had the idea of putting a box on top of wheels and pushing or pulling it along-- well, then, the idea sped around the world on wheels of fire, so rapidly that it's impossible to say with certainty where it started. For instance, although the Incas and Aztecs of South America famously didn't have wheeled vehicles, their children did have push-along wheeled toys. It was probably the unforgiving local landscape that held back the development of wheeled traffic.

Other chapters cover the spring, the magnet, the lens, the pump and -- one of my favourite chapters -- string. Ah, yes, where would we be without string? I am, myself, a very heavy user of string, always tying tomatoes and dahlias to supportive posts. And tying together stuff tightly because I can't be bothered to find a nail and a hammer.

 Nuts and Bolts: How Tiny Inventions Make Our World Work -- I highly recommend it. It's very readable, is enormously informative, and sends your thoughts racing off -- on wheels! -- in all directions.

  Nuts and Bolts: How Tiny Inventions Make Our World Work

 

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