Fire, Edge and Blow: Ten Tools of the Home Workshop

Stone hammers are known from about 3.3 million years ago near Lake Turkana in Kenya, and lashing a handle to the head, dated to roughly 30,000 BCE, turned a stone into a true hammer. Later stops on this path, from the chisel to the forge, work alongside it.

A chisel is a cutting edge driven by hand or by a mallet blow, so it pairs naturally with the hammer. Neolithic stone chisels from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany date to roughly 4100 to 2700 BCE. Cold chisels cut metal and stone chisels cut masonry, beside the woodworker's firmer, paring and mortise forms.

A handsaw cuts with rows of teeth instead of a single edge. Egyptian hieroglyphics show woodworkers sawing boards, and ancient bow saws have been found in Japan. Crosscut teeth cut across the grain, while rip teeth cut with it.

A drawknife has a blade with a handle at each end, pulled toward the user in long strokes to shave wood away. A sixteenth century illustration in De Re Metallica shows one used with a shaving horse.

The spokeshave is the drawknife's finer cousin, with a closed mouth over the blade for smoothing curved work. The name is documented from at least the sixteenth century, and early examples were beech with a steel blade before metal bodies spread in the later nineteenth century.

Here the path moves from cutting wood to shaping hot metal. The forge is the hearth that brings metal to working heat, and the Hittites of Anatolia are credited with developing iron smelting around 1500 BC.

The bellows keeps the forge fire hot enough to work. Its invention in antiquity was a precondition for iron smelting and welding, and early Chinese bellows were ox hide with two pots, described in a Warring States text attributed to Mozi in the fourth century BCE.

A swage block is a heavy iron or steel block pierced with holes and grooved on its edges, which a smith uses to hold, bend and form heated bars. Industrial blocks serve commercial smithing, while artist blacksmiths use custom blocks shaped for items such as spoons and ladles.

The last two stops belong to the glassblower, who also works with fire. The glory hole is a separate furnace used to reheat a piece in between steps of working it, because molten glass cools and stiffens quickly during shaping.

Jacks are two hinged blades, somewhat like large tweezers, used to narrow, groove and refine hot glass on the blowpipe or punty. Blown glass itself dates to Phoenician and Syrian craftsmen in the first century BC.