[OT - Crescent Wrench] - Re: 8.10b - first impression and questions

[Thorny]

On Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:02:44 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:

> David McGlone wrote:
> 
>> On Thursday 09 October 2008 11:13:35 am Art Alexion wrote:
>>> On Thursday 09 October 2008 11:01:20 am Nigel Ridley wrote:
>>> > You know how hard it is to find an adjustable metric wrench in the
>>> > USA.......!
>>>
>>> Yep... *I've* never seen one...
>> 
>> It's called a Crescent wrench.
> 
> Not in my neck of the woods.  A crescent wrench is a _fixed_ size open
> wrench.

Since I'm reading this OT thread I might as well put in my $.02.

Not sure where your neck of the woods is but I can certainly understand
that there could be regional or local names for some tools. I've even been
in workplaces where there were localised, internal, names used for
specific tools. Sometimes they were names that I won't include in a post
and really had nothing to do with the tool or its use other than perhaps
the way the tool looked physically.

My understanding is that the name Crescent Wrench became a popular name
for an adjustable open end wrench (the generic name) presumably because
the name of the Crescent Tool Company was so prominently displayed on the
handle and most humans like to deal with simple nicknames rather than a
generic name which takes longer to say.

I think it possible and likely that the Crescent Tool Company was the
first to produce an adjustable open end wrench. When I was in high school
shop class we were forced to use generic names for tools, thus a
"Phillips" screwdriver had to be referred to as a crosspoint or crosshead
screwdriver. Another example which you will probably recognise (since your
email address ends with .ca) is the "Robertson" screw which is a square
socket screw (to differentiate from hex socket screws which use an "Allen
key", hex key). I'm guessing most names derived from the inventor's
surname. Similar in the world of over-the-counter drugs is the common name
"Aspirin" which is a copyrighted name for a product of the Bayer Company.
(I think they were the first to produce ASA).