ねじとねじ回し-この千年で最高の発明をめぐる物語 [単行本]

   1999年にニューヨークタイムズマガジンの編集者が、著名な建築と都市計画の研究者であるヴィトルト・リプチンスキに、この千年間で最も優れた、利用価値の高い道具についての短いエッセイを書くことを提案した。この提案をリプチンスキは受け入れ、仕事場にある道具―― 金づち、鋸（のこぎり）、水準器、鉋（かんな） ――の歴史を調べていったのだが、そうしたものの系統をたどってみると、ほとんどははるか大昔に端を発したものなのだった。これはもうダメだと思った彼は、妻に意見を求めた。彼女の答えは刺激的なものだった。「あなたが何かしようとする時には、たいていねじ回しが必要でしょう」と。

   確かにそうだった。ねじ回しは、人類の道具箱の仲間としては比較的新しいものであることをリプチンスキは発見した。それは中世ヨーロッパ時代の発明で、中国の影響を受けていない発明品なのだ。もちろん、他の多くのこと同様、レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチはごく早い時期にねじ回しのアイデアを思いついており、交換可能なギア付きのいろいろな種類のねじ切り機を設計している。それでもなお、ねじ（および、ねじ回しと旋盤）が一般的に使われるようになるまでには何世代もかかり、マイナスドライバーやソケットなどのねじが登場したのは最近になってからだ。

   ねじの発展を１冊の本にまとめ上げたリプチンスキの探求は、とてもおもしろく、読者が日用品の起源に興味を抱くようになるのは確実だ。（Gregory McNamee, Amazon.com）
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水道の蛇口から携帯電話まで、日常空間のそこここに顔を出すねじ。この小さな道具こそ、千年間で最大の発明だと著者は言う。なぜなら、これを欠いて科学の精密化も新興国の経済発展もありえなかったからだ。中世の甲冑や火縄銃に始まり、旋盤に改良を凝らした近代の職人たちの才気、果ては古代ギリシアのねじの原形にまでさかのぼり、ありふれた日用品に宿る人類の叡知を鮮やかに解き明かす軽快な歴史物語。解説/小関智弘 --このテキストは、 文庫 版に関連付けられています。

ねじとねじ回しの起源を探りながら、著者は甲胄や火縄銃史への脱線を楽しみつつ、ねじにまつわる技術を精密化し、標準化し、改良した天才技術者たちの姿を鮮やかに謳いあげる。技術史の風変わりな一面を見事に切り取った、探偵小説のように愉しい歴史物語。

ねじとねじ回しの起源を探りながら、甲冑や火縄銃史への脱線を楽しみつつ、ねじにまつわる技術を精密化・標準化し、改良した天才技術者達の姿を鮮やかに描く。技術史の風変わりな一面を切り取った、スリリングな歴史物語。

In 1999, an editor of the New York Times Magazine approached Witold Rybczynski, the well-known student of architecture and urban design, and asked him to write a short essay on the best and most useful common tool of the past millennium. Rybczynski took the assignment, but when he began to look into the history of the items in his workshop--hammers and saws, levels and planes--he found that almost all of them had pedigrees that extended well into antiquity. Nearly ready to admit defeat, he asked his wife for ideas. Her answer was inspired: "You always need a screwdriver for something."

True enough. And, Rybczynski discovered, the screwdriver is a relative newcomer in humankind's arsenal of gadgetry, an invention of the late European Middle Ages and the only major mechanical device that the Chinese did not independently invent. Leonardo da Vinci got to it early on, of course, as he did so many other things, designing a number of screw-cutting machines with interchangeable gears. Still, it took generations for the screw (and with it the screwdriver and lathe) to come into general use, and it was not until the modern era that such improvements as slotted and socket screws came into being.

Rybczynski's explorations into that lineage, here expanded to book length, are highly entertaining, and sure to engage readers interested in the origins of everyday things. --Gregory McNamee
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Acclaimed hardware, household and landscape writer Rybczynski invites readers to see how the world got screwedAand why it took so long, and how it felt. Romans had most of our hand tools, though cranks are medieval; screws and screwdrivers, however, originatedAwhen? Scottish crafts manuals from around the time of the American Revolution give screwdrivers as "turnscrews"; the same word in French, tournevis, turns up in 1723. Even earlier, screws appeared as a spinoff from Renaissance warfare, keeping the parts of a matchlock rifle linked. Used in timepieces and armaments, the screws of the 16th century were hand-cutAboth expensive and unreliable. Efficient, widespread screwing required (a) more uses, to up the demand; (b) steam power, aka the Industrial Revolution; and (c) smart mechanics and engineers, who invented the manufacturing procedures that Rybczynski describes. Canada's Peter L. Robertson came up with the wondrous socket-head (square-holed) screw; the inferior Phillips (+-holed) head came later, but became standard outside Canada. Siege engines, early firearms like the arquebus, 19th-century child labor, the precision lathe, door hinges and the great minds of ancient Greek geometry also figure among the threads of Rybczynski's tightly wound exposition. A professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, Rybczynski began this book after the New York Times asked him to pick the Tool of the Millennium. The short volume can feel like a bagatelle compared to Rybczynski's most ambitious projectsAhis biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, or the endeavor (chronicled in his Home) of building his own house plank by plank. Nevertheless, Rybczynski's many fansAand those who care for the history of hardwareAwill want to stick their heads in his new book: many will find themselves fastened to its story. (Sept.)
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The seeds of Witold Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying "the best tool of the millennium." The award-winning author of Home: A Short History of an Idea and, most recently, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century, Rybczynski once built a house using only hand tools. His intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- serves him beautifully on his quest.

One Good Turn is a story starring Archimedes, who invented the water screw and introduced the helix, and Leonardo, who sketched a machine for carving wood screws. It is a story of mechanical discovery and genius that takes readers from Ancient Greece to Victorian Glasgow, from weapons design in the Italian Renaissance to car design in the age of American industry. Rybczynski writes an ode to the screw, without which there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no enlightenment science. The screwdriver, perhaps the last hand tool in a world gone cyber, represents nothing less than the triumph of precision.

One of our finest cultural and architectural historians, Rybczynski renders a graceful, original, and engaging portrait of the tool that changed the course of civilization.
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Witold Rybczynski, born in Edinburgh, raised in Canada, and currently living in Philadelphia, is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written on architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of the critically acclaimed Home and the A Clearing in the Distance, a biography of frederick Law Olmsted, for which he was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He is the recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize. --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

リプチンスキ,ヴィトルト
ポーランド系の両親のあいだに、エディンバラに生まれる。現在ペンシルベニア大学マーティン&マージ・メイヤーソン都市学教授。『心地好いわが家を求めて』をはじめとする、建築・住宅から技術文化一般までを扱った著書多数

春日井 晶子
東京外国語大学卒。英米文学翻訳家(本データはこの書籍が刊行された当時に掲載されていたものです)