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We all know that there has been a tremendous revival in hand tools. I learned to work with wood in the early 1970s, and the old geezers I worked with would sometimes head for the joiner, and sometimes pick up a plane. They had a sense of which tool was better for any given task. They all used tools they had purchased when they were young, and when I went looking for tools of my own I couldn’t find many new ones that were worth buying. I ended up spending a lot of money ($35.00) at the time for an English shoulder plane, and I borrowed the Stanley No. 4 from my dad, who had borrowed it about 20 years before from his dad. We’re much better off today, but I’ve been wondering lately about why we needed a revival. Why were hand tools all but abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s?
I have some theories, and in search for evidence beyond my own thoughts I decided to take a look at how-to magazines from fifty years ago. The image above is from the February 1951 issue of Popular Mechanics. Google Books has issues available online going back to 1905. I haven’t come to any conclusions yet, but I did come across some interesting ads.
Here’s a fifty-year old image of the ideal power tool shop of the day, complete with knotty-pine paneling and linoleum tile floor. The tools are small in scale, but aren’t too out of line. Other ads however, seem a bit silly. One of the hot items of the day was the portable electric drill, and it seems there was a race to make the drill a universal power source for all manner of tasks.
I’ve never seen an Arco-Saw, but my dad did have an attachment that turned his electric drill into a jig saw. Or so it claimed on the box. I tried to get it to work a time or two as a teenager, but never had much success. Safety was also a concern back then, and here is another item I’ve never seen:
The idea is that the blade has only eight teeth, and they protrude only .020″ from the plate. It features a “wedge cutting action” that eliminates kick back. I’m surprised that no one carried the idea to the next level; a blade with no teeth would eliminate kickback and sawdust as well.
Ads for power tools were far more numerous than those for hand tools, but there were hand tool ads in print, along with numerous gizmos for sharpening and setting hand saws, and golden opportunities to be found in the saw sharpening business.
And there were a few non-woodworking ads that caught my eye.
My older brother had a chemistry set, but I don’t believe that his came equipped with “Safe Atomic Energy”. That’s just as well, since most of his experiments involved pyrotechnics. What really made me want a time machine was this:
$3.75 was a considerable sum in 1951, but I think a jet propelled bicycle would be well worth it.
I didn’t get much closer to answering the question I had, but I did get an interesting look at the culture of the time. If you have any favorite oddball tools from the era, or theories about why hand tools fell out of fashion before making a comeback, tell us about them by leaving a comment below.
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