A box of tools – then and now

At some point over the winter I stumbled onto a mention of the Mastermyr chest on the web, and marveled at the similarity of thousand-year-old Viking tools to hand tools today:

Not long after, I was puttering in the workshop with Z, who was fascinated by and kept pulling tools out of my own wooden toolbox, so I decided to pull everything out, dump the sawdust and drywall screws, and take my own version:

It appears that the Mastermyr box owner was a locksmith, and I imagine folks in that trade as being clever, thoughtful, and handy. It’s fun to imagine a Viking craftsman time-traveling into the present and wondering at 21st century tools; most I imagine they’d figure out quickly, even if they weren’t a thing back then (bubble level, chalk line, hex wrenches). The stud finder and the digital multimeter might take some explaining. Just imagine the fascination of the Mastermyr craftsman on figuring out a staple gun – or a pneumatic framing nailer!

I’ve been enjoying a trove of practical history blog posts by a classical historian named Bret Devereaux (here’s a series about iron and ironworking). In some ways technology is surprisingly stable (e.g. pliers, hammers); in others it changes very quickly. It seems that one of the blacksmith’s most time-consuming tasks back in the day was making nails, and when I was growing up a big part of carpentry was driving large galvanized nails. Then along came pneumatics and high-quality structural screws, and recently my dad has been trying to figure out what to do with hundreds of pounds of leftover nails and spikes that it may never make sense to drive.