Re: Oswego State 2009-10 Regular Season Thread
Yeah, but crescent describes the shape of an adjustable wrench. Reseeding conveys an inaccurate description
Oooohhh, this guy's good! However, in the interest of both historical accuracy and digressing even further from a hockey thread...
"The Crescent Tool Company of Jamestown, New York was founded by Karl Peterson in 1907. Peterson was an active inventor who had previously been associated with two other tool makers in the Jamestown area, the J.P. Danielson Company and Wm. Hjorth & Company. (See our article on the J.P. Danielson Company for more information.)
Crescent Tool initially produced tools including a type of wrench-plier known as a "lightning wrench", but the company soon became best known as a maker of adjustable wrenches. Crescent's particular adjustable wrench design became very well known, even to the point that all makes of this style came to be called "crescent" wrenches. The actual wrench design did not originate with Crescent, however, and there is some debate as to its origins.
The 1857 patent #17,531 by Edward J. Worcester describes the basic design of a movable jaw sliding in a slot below a fixed jaw, and all modern designs clearly owe a debt to this early patent. The Swedish company BAHCO also claims to have invented the modern style of adjustable wrench, and the BAHCO design may have served as the inspiration for Crescent's design.
According to Crescent company folklore, Karl Peterson received a visitor from Sweden who described an interesting adjustable wrench he had seen in Sweden. Peterson was intrigued and immediately set to work on carving a wooden model based on the visitor's description, and then Peterson and the other Crescent engineers tried to figure out how the wrench could be produced efficiently. Cutting the slot for the sliding jaw proved to be the most difficult operation, and for this task Crescent created a special slotting machine."
http://home.comcast.net/~alloy-artifacts/crescent-tool.html#history
Next we will turn to the chicken and egg discussion...