100 Objects #2: 60-Degree Screw

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1:20In 1904, Baltimore had an enormous fire. This is historian Daniel Emervar. And a fire that was so big and it went on for so long that, A, it completely overwhelmed Baltimore firefighters, but B, it just lasted long enough for Baltimore to desperately call for help from neighboring fire companies. No one knows for sure how the fire started. But as the fire spread to block after block of Baltimore's downtown, the SOS went out to nearby cities. So Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, Harrisburg, and the other firefighters rushed to fight the fire. And, you know, they had their hoses and they were ready to screw their hoses into the hydrants and get to work.

2:03And when they started to do that, they realized that their hoses couldn't screw into the hydrants. There was a fundamental material incompatibility, which basically left them completely unable to do anything. And so they just watched as more than 1 ,500 houses burned in one of the worst fires in U.S. history. When it was finally put out, one journalist said that the city looked like Pompeii. 80 blocks had burned for 31 hours. The fire highlighted something about 1904 that we don't think about a lot today. The problem with those hoses not fitting was kind of the problem with everything. A bushel of greens weighed 10 pounds in North Carolina, 30 in Tennessee.

2:52A 50-foot truck leaving Vermont would be 25 feet too long to enter Kentucky. One of the examples I like is football, what we call football in the United States, a national sport. No one agreed what a football was. Different teams had dramatically different size and shapes footballs. Just the central object of football, the football, went undefined. The early 20th century was the Wild West for standards. Everywhere you went, things were just defined differently. Before 1927, even traffic lights were different. In New York, you would stop on green. And it was different in Buffalo. And it just took a while before them to be like, Like, oh, yeah, we should really have the same system in the same city.

3:36Today, we all stop at red and go on green. One of the endless standards that is so standard, we don't even think of it as a standard. Now, everything we use, every way we travel or place we visit, is held together by an agreement about how every tiny detail should be. But landing on those agreements, that took long, protracted fights. fights between regulators and manufacturers, politicians and lobbyists. And perhaps no fight was as challenging or as consequential as the battle over the thing literally holding our world together, the screw thread. The screw thread is the way in which you achieve metal-on-metal fastening.

4:18And it turns out that the industrial world is full of occasions when you need to fasten one piece of metal or rigid object to another. Like, that's the industrial revolution. And as industry was taking off in the U.S., the disagreement over the screw thread had become dire. A disagreement whose consequences would spiral out across the world. So you get these moments where, like, senators will start just talking about, like, the importance of the humble screw thread. I found one who said, the screw thread is a simple device, but it ties together the whole mechanical skeleton of our civilization.

4:51Which, on the one hand, seems overblown, but you're like, is it wrong? I don't know that it's wrong. From 99 % Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, how America used the screw thread to build an invisible empire. And that little thing, the screw thread, is such a potent, hard to notice, but nevertheless deeply consequential symbol of the way in which the United States has remade the world or the world has had to remake itself to accommodate the United States.

5:39Let's fast forward to the 1920s. Almost nothing is standardized. The world is still utter chaos. That's barely an exaggeration. But the American government is starting to take the problem seriously. And luckily, there was one particular bureaucrat who was ready to tackle this chaos. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. When I had grown up, I had known Hoover to be the president who oversaw the Depression. And I just thought, well, he must have been wildly incompetent. And, you know, sure, maybe he wasn't a very good communicator or steward of the country's economic fortunes. but he was a really good bureaucrat and he was deeply invested.

6:20I mean, actually sort of ideologically obsessed with standardization. I mean, at a time when, you know, the economy was not the most stable thing and workers were fighting with factory owners and sometimes that was getting quite violent. You could be on one side of that and you could support the unions. You could be on another side of that. You could be for the bosses. And Herbert Hoover was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Everyone's screwing this up because we can actually just get a much more efficient economy and squeeze much more juice from the lemon if we just make the objects more efficient.

6:51So what a weird technocratic strategy. But he's like, oh, all of these arguments are just about slight profit margins and we can get far larger ones if we can get everything to be more efficient. And the way to do that is to just draw manufacturers into a room and get them to agree to do things the same way. Because once that happens, everything speeds up and all the friction in the economy goes away. That was his big, big calling. Bringing the world of objects into peace and harmony was really a natural extension of who Hoover was. The kind of guy with a cat he named Mr. Cat. The kind of guy who loves to fish, but not just for the sport of it.

7:33Because it promoted meekness and quieted hate in the soul. The kind of guy who, when he went fishing, he did it in a full suit. A starched collar, tie, and jacket under his waders. So you're like, he dressed up for the fish. Oh my God, what a respectful man. Lovely guy. So lovely. Unless you try to bend the rules. Once when Hoover was younger, he was manning the ticket booth at a college baseball game and found himself face-to-face with former president Benjamin Harrison. And Herbert Hoover won't let him in because he doesn't have a ticket. Like, this is a guy who believes in the rules. Yeah, that's right.

8:10He believes in the system. But Hoover had his work cut out for him because getting everyone to agree on what that standard should be was nearly impossible. Standards are a funny thing because everyone wants to be on the same page, but no one wants to have to do that by getting onto someone else's page. And the more these industries develop, the more each corporation is invested in their own world. There was just a lot of physical retooling that would have to be done. So you would lose a lot of capital if you had to suddenly start making things the way that your competitor made them rather than the way that you were accustomed to make them.

8:52Yeah, because not only would you have to retool, in the process of retooling, your competitor is continuing to sell and develop and manufacture things while you're like waiting for your screw thread to conform to some kind of standard. And in all that time, your competitor is going to try to snap up all your business. But do not worry your pretty little heads. Herbert Hoover has a plan, a calm, well-reasoned plan. So his move is not to pass laws. His move is just to get the manufacturers to agree. And apparently he was shockingly persuasive in doing so. So as commerce secretary, he pulls in the manufacturers of paving bricks.

9:35And it's like, okay, there are 66 kinds of paving bricks, which is altogether too many. Can there be fewer? Well, there can. And actually, paving brick is relatively easy because it's just dimensional. So after talking to Herbert Hoover, there are 11 kinds of paving brick. But that's the easy round. He just keeps going. It is everything. So standards for lumber, cement, doors, steel, bedsprings, mattresses, hospital linens, ball bearings, brake linings, and then like just things that you don't think need standards. Do glass tumblers need to be standardized? Not necessarily in their shape, but how many hours of boiling water can they withstand in order to be sold as glass tumblers?

10:16Six is the answer. Okay, there was an answer to that question. What percentage of new rubber on their treads must tires have? 70%. It's just like everything. Every standard, every specification, that's the world that Herbert Hoover is trying to make.

10:35So, of all these things, one great challenge was the humble screw. Yeah. So, could you talk about this as a challenge and, you know, what we're dealing with here when it comes to a screw? You have to think of the standardization of the screw as a kind of mega standardization. So if you're standardizing hospital linens, that's an issue for hospital linen producers. If you're standardizing the screw, that's everyone. Screws are in everything. And even if you're producing an object that doesn't have screws in it, like hospital linens, you're doing it with a machine that requires screws. Let's zoom in on how the screw works for a second.

11:16The thing that makes the screw hold two objects together is the screw thread, that raised ridge that's wrapped around the cylinder. That thread has a particular angle, which used to be different in different screws. The variation is not easily visible to the eye. You wouldn't look at a 55-degree screw thread angle and think it looks hugely different from a 60-degree one. The difference is everything. The difference is absolutely everything. The angle of the screw thread has to match the angle of the groove inside the object it's going into in order for it to work. And you can't really tell if a screw is going to fit into something until you try it.

11:58And more and more, that was becoming everyone's problem. Like, the scale of this isn't just like people agreeing on a thing who are muckety-mucks and bureaucrats in different states or whatever and coming up with legislation. This is literally every person who makes a machine and every machine that makes a thing has to agree on this. These are tiny, tiny people who maybe have one machine in their whole factory. Yeah, that's right. And then you also think that basically it's a whole world that has to be reconstituted. Like, okay, if you have a machine in your factory that is with a now noncompliant form of screw thread, all those spare parts, you have to buy them anew.

12:38So there's this recognition that getting a standardized screw needs to be done. And at some point they achieve it. When did that happen? That happens in the 1920s. It happens under Hoover. And it's really hard because it's one thing to get the paving brick manufacturers in a room. But to deal with a screw thread problem, that's everything. Screws are in everything. And again, it's one of those really tricky things. Everyone wants there to be a standard. No one wants to lose out. They don't want it to be someone else's standard. So Herbert Hoover works his extraordinary magic. And in 1924, there is a national screw thread standard.

13:17And Hoover, I just imagine him feeling like the moment of his greatest triumph in this bureaucrat's life. He says, now the half-inch nuts screw on to all the half-inch bolts. What a dream. Utopia is ours.

13:36put yourself in hoover's state of mind here if you could like you have a screw with you like what do you see when you see this if you're herbert hoover yeah so if you're herbert hoover the thing that you're the most locked in on is the screw thread angle and so the screw thread angle that the united states agrees on is the 60 degree angle that's a huge achievement but that means like every other screw thread no longer works like at all. Yeah. So, so, so this consortium sort of agrees. Now this published standard happens, this consortium, people vaguely agree. They begin to make their things in this, a 60 degree threading.

14:16Um, you know, this solves the problem of the U S this is a huge achievement in and of itself. Um, but this is not what happened necessarily in the rest of the world. So what's going on in the rest of the world in terms of screw threads and things like this? It's exactly the same thing. But you have to imagine that all of the kind of anarchy that the United States was experiencing locally is actually even worse on a global scale. You know, the early 20th century is a time of rapid pace technological development. And every year that there's just more stuff being made, it starts to matter more how it's made and whether the objects can speak to each other.

14:59I think language is a really good metaphor here. What you have to imagine is that the United States is producing a growing world of industrial objects that all speak 60 degrees. And then when those objects venture out into the world, they encounter a world of foreign objects that, I mean, it's not even a language that's commensurable. It's not even a language that's comprehensible. They're just like, oh, you speak 55 degrees. We will never talk. There's nothing for us to talk about. I don't know what you're saying. We can never have any relationship with each other. But then World War II came along and demanded that we have a very real screw-based relationship with the rest of the world.

15:39So there's this famous moment when FDR is trying to explain why, despite the fact that World War II has not yet hit the Americas, The United States should actually be deeply interested in this war and, in fact, might need to participate in it, if not fighting, at least by supplying material. And so the way he puts it is this. Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire and I have a length of garden hose. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I might help him put out his fire. And, I mean, I'm a historian. I've seen that line, like, many, many times. And it's always about being a good neighbor.

16:14But then when you think about it, you're like, wait a minute. You know, imagine yourself as Herbert Hoover, and you just imagine yourself, like, kind of raising your hand in the back of the room and being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What if your hose doesn't fit his hydrant? You've got a serious problem.

16:33And the cost of non-compliant screw threads, it's bad enough during peace, it's horror during war.

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19:26got more and more involved in the Second World War, it quickly became clear this was a different kind of war than we had ever fought before. So World War I was fought with horses. World War II is a much more mechanized war. In fact, one of the main ways in which the United States participates in World War II is essentially acting as quartermaster to the world, as supplying stuff to all of its allies. It outsources the fighting to other countries, and it just sends its factories into overdrive. The problem that everyone recognizes at the start of the war is that none of the U.S. stuff plays with the foreign stuff.

20:06So there's a Canadian official who just says, look, you have to understand that at the start of the war, there is not a single gun or a single round of ammunition that can be shared among the Allies. The bullets are slightly different sizes. And so one bullet doesn't fit another gun. The U.S. bombs do not fit the U.K. bomb racks. And that sounds like a small thing, but, like, try dropping a bomb if the bomb doesn't fit on the bomb rack. You'll drop it with your hands. Yeah, you'll drop it, but not in the way you want it to.

20:40And, of course, there's a huge problem with the screws. They're in the weapons, tanks, and planes, which all have to work in faraway places. So, like, think about sending a Jeep. So that's a thing that happened a lot. The United States was setting Jeeps all over the world. And first of all, it's inefficient to ship a Jeep. So what you want to do is you want to do the IKEA method and you want to ship parts of a Jeep. But that means you have to have people on the other end who can put the Jeep together. Okay, so that's fine. But then, you know, the Jeep's of course going to break. And it's going to break down in all kinds of ways.

21:13So that means you have to have on the other part of the world people who know how to work with that Jeep. And they have all of the parts that allow them to repair the Jeep. And you need that in dozens of countries all at the same time. The design, construction, and repair of everything that the Army had to have to survive the war all relied on screws that often just didn't fit. Throughout the war, the U.S. spent$600 million shipping extra screws, nuts, and bolts overseas to deal with the incompatibility issues. $600 million on screws. That's enough money to build 1 ,000 B-29 bombers. So in the middle of this war, there's a meeting to try to solve some of this problem because the British recognize that they need to sort of get onto the standard.

22:06Could you talk about that? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, it's amazing in some ways that in the middle of the war, while the British are literally being bombed, they're debating about screw-thread standards. But of course they're debating about screw-thread standards because if you don't work this out, the whole thing comes grinding to a halt. Like Herbert Hoover's point that incompatibility of standards is a massive inefficiency. I mean that just sounds like a dorky thing to say, but it turns out if you're in the middle of a war, inefficiencies are lethal. And so you really do want to resolve the screw-thread issue.

22:38Now, Britain operates on a 55-degree screw thread, so they don't speak to each other. And it's not just Britain, it's the entire British empire. So there's already a global scale political unit that works on the 55 degree screw thread angle, but also has become newly dependent on the industrial might of the United States. And so there are a series of Anglo-US meetings between 1943 and 1945. And I just sort of went through them all. And what you can see is the formerly proud world-dominating British just being humbled and chastened and eventually completely given up. So the first meeting they have, like meeting one, they say, we would be willing to talk about screw thread standardization.

23:23Okay. Interesting. Okay. Let's have that conversation. Second meeting, they say, we would agree to consider retooling. So the screw thread standardization would happen by us adopting your screw thread is something that we would consider. In the third meeting, they say, okay, we are retooling, but it is just temporary. It is just for the purposes of the war. Don't think that you own us. In the fourth meeting, they just say, OK, we're now on your screw thread standard. Wow. Wow. I suppose if you're in a negotiation, it helps to have the person you're negotiating with being bombed currently. Bombs are literally dropping on London as they're working all this out.

24:03Yeah. This moment, the UK agreeing to adopt the U.S. screw thread is a huge win for the U.S. For one, retooling everything, all the weapons and planes and Jeeps, that's expensive. And then I think atop of it, you have to see the symbolic humiliation. You know, it's one thing for the United States to declare independence. This is the British declaring dependence. This is the British basically saying that in the realm of objects, which turns out to be a really important economically determinative realm, we're going to take orders from you rather than the other way around. We benefited greatly from World War II not happening on our shores.

24:43Totally. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, just think about World War II from a military perspective. First of all, it's happening at a moment of enormous technological dynamism. So the kinds of things that can be produced after the war compared to the kinds that could be produced before are barely recognizable. Just even just the war itself is a time of great invention. And all of those inventions are going to nudge the globe toward a more united, technologically interdependent configuration. and then the war accelerates that tremendously, a single country right at the end of the war is producing some like 60 % of all of the industrial products of the world, is diplomatically dominant.