nian
photo 56626.)]

The description of Barber's brace documents a major technical change:
wood to steel, leather washers to ball bearings, and natural patina to
nickel plate. It is also an explanation for the appearance and shape of
craftmen's tools, either hand forged or mass produced. In each case, the
sought-after result in the form of a finished product has been an
implement of "fineness and beauty." This quest motivated three centuries
of toolmakers and brought vitality to hand-tool design. Moxon had
advised:

He that will a good Edge win,
Must Forge thick and Grind thin.[28]

If heeded, the result would be an edge tool that assured its owner "ease
and delight."[29] Throughout the period considered here, the most
praiseworthy remarks made about edge tools were variations of either
"unsurpassed in quality, finish, and beauty of style" or, more simply,
commendation for "excellent design and superior workmanship."[30] The
hand tool thus provoked the same value words in the 19th as in the 17th
century.

The aesthetics of industrial art, whether propounded by Moxon or by an
official at the Philadelphia Centennial, proved the standard measure by
which quality could be judged. Today these values are particularly valid
when applied to a class of artifacts that changed slowly and have as
their prime characteristics anonymity of maker and date. With such
objects the origin, transition, and variation of shape are of primary
interest. Consider the common auger whose "Office" Moxon declared "is to
make great round holes" and whose importance was so clearly stressed at
Philadelphia in 1876.[31] Neither its purpose nor its gross appearance
(a T-handled boring tool) had changed. The tool did, however, develop
qualitatively through 200 years, from a pod or shell to a spiral bit,
from a blunt to a gimlet point, and from a hand-fashioned to a
geometrically exact, factory-made implement: innovations associated with
Cooke (1770), L'Hommedieu (1809), and Jennings (1850's). In each
instance the tool was improved--a double spiral facilitated the
discharge of shavings, a gimlet point allowed the direct insertion of
the auger, and machine precision brought mathematical accuracy to the
degree of twist. Still, overall appearance did not change. At the
Centennial, Moxon would have recognized an auger, and, further, his
lecture on its uses would have been singularly current. The large-bore
spiral auger still denoted a mortise, tenon,