Screw Thread Solves 173-Year-Old Mystery
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ก.ย. 2024
- www.ien.com/vi...
A new study from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, published in The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology, has discovered that the Crystal Palace was the first building known to use a standard screw thread. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
As an engineer, I don't understand what mystery it was to use a then well known standard from 1841 a decade later.
Using it in a building was the "innovation".
I guess context is why it's a mystery. Not knowing when these threads were standardized, I expected a fast screwing coarse thread which would speed up the process.
You're omitting a lot about BSW threads...
Sure, the standardisation was a boon, but the thread profile is, well, amazing.
The tips and troughs are rounded, not sharp (part of the standard). As such they don't sieze nearly as much.
Annecdote time:
I was involved in he restoration of a 150 year old cast iron water wheel.
Thanks to Whitworth thread, and a bucket load of red lead oxide putty, the nuts and bolts came undone with hand held spanners (wrenches).
A Whit thread; done up tight for 100 years, give it a quarter turn and you can do the rest with your fingers.
Also the best thread for cast iron.
Actually the whitworth thread was optimised for wrought iron (not cast iron).
Whitworth above all was a machinist trained by the British inventor of the screw cutting metal working lathe - Henry Maudslay.
His first two standard bolts, the 5/8th inch had a one inch across flats head (because it was made from 1” square bar) and the other the 1/2” bolt had a 0.707” head - what you get when you take a 1” round bar and cut it square to take a wrench. Square headed bolts and nuts are still used for railway applications…
I partially disagree . The lack sharp points and corners ( as in Acme threads ) gives the Whitworth an advantage of fracture resistance over just about all other designs . I think this feature is more valuable than seize resistance ,,, !
@@rolandtamaccio3285 Acme threads are designed for linear force without binding.
BA/Thury threads are optimised for brass.
Whitworth threads are optimised for wrought iron and vibration resistance.
Metric and Unified threads were optimised to look pretty on a drawing with 60 degree thread angles…
(As a note the British Association threads copied the Swiss metric Thury threads with the exception of rounding radiuses).
@@rolandtamaccio3285 👍
I guess you don't live in the rust belt, or Scotland...
We'd probably need to go back in time and ask Mr Whitworth what his priorities were...
As a nut and bolt fanatic, thanks for the insightful video. I really appreciate the fact that a bolt built to the correct specs fit a 170+ yr old nut. Which is how life is supposed to work. 🇺🇲
Whitworth threads (36 to the inch) are still used in microscope objective lens mounts.
And metric pipe threads…
So aliens didn't build it then?
Well, I guess they really screwed that up...
"Puzzled".... There wasn't any puzzle, it was built that quickly as it was pre-fabricated (and indeed moved) to be built for the Great Exhibition (of Industrial prowess) and the Standard Bolt was literally one of the innovations being put on show in the show... There's no puzzle here, no mystery....
If this International Journal article proves anything it is that the writers themselves forgot a bunch of pretty recent knowledge; we can forgive lost knowledge from Ancient times, from even the Dark Ages, but from less than 200 years ago, ner that's on you.
I think of this more as a verbal article than a serious "we had no idea". He's presenting the story in a way that catches the interest of people more than "how standard screw threads improved building efficiency".
lots of pretty recent knowledge is lost... polaroid springs to mind... the whole thermodynamic aspect of steam seems lost on the average "content creator"...
who knows morse code still?
most of the last two generations cant even read properly... or count...
I don't understand how the use and manufacturing of these threads became a mystery in the first place. No construction specs exist? Not one person wrote about doing this, at the time? And so on. How did all the information about such an immense, important and innovative building remain a secret, and then, vanish?
When BA threads where introduced in about 1910 . There were thinking even then of using metric threads .
BA was the first standardised British metric thread.
They should have gone full metric. British cars were shit because of it.
Imagine being the guy who has to find the matching nuts and bolts in a mixed up pile.
Do that every time I look in my bucket of bits!🤣
Pretty cool fact, just a shame Witworth wasn't recognised at the time for his unified bolt thread design.
And here I was thinking it was a super coarse low TPI so they could be screwed in faster forgetting that standard threads are a fairly recent invention.
Right up my alley. I've been trying to figure out when broom handle thread was standardized the way it is now in the United States at least.
Glass and Cast iron "burnt dwn " .. .,🤔
Wood floors
My thought, also.
The heat melted the glass and the structure deformed then collapsed.
Burned down, how?
It was the internal contents that were combustible. Once a big fire gets going, the glass and steelwork doesn't stand a chance. I hate drawing a parallel, but on 9/11, the World Trade Centre structure was weakened by the fires leading to the collapse.
Funny, these standard doomed the UK industry as metric became the world standard. Same happening in the US. Non metric companies unable to sell outside the us, poor quality, more expensive...
Sometimes the Algorithm just knows…
Get out of vision! We don't need to see you.
Dumb it down bro…😂
😀
Flash forward to WWII. The Brits still hadn't mastered standardization and the US had to build the Rolls Royce Merlin engines for the Brits.
What history book are you reading?
The British designed and built the RR Merlin for themselves, the US built the Merlin under license for US use in the P-51.
@@Surestick88 As I understood it, the British Merlins were still fitted together, resulting in each engine very much having its own personality.
Utter baloney.
@@leifvejby8023 Yes, the British were still "fitting" each engine together. If a new part was needed, it could not be taken off the shelf. It had to be fitted to the specific engine they were working on. They had no concept of tolerances which made all parts interchangeable and allowed high production rates. If it hadn't been for US production techniques, the people of England would be eating wienerschnitzel at this moment.
The American engineers found the British tolerances on the original parts to be far looser than their machines could produce. The original Merlin required hand finishing of parts to fit correctly. American machines enabled the Merlin to be put together like the standard Ford auto engines of the time: on an assembly line with no time-consuming "finishers".