Tools Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
This tools trivia quiz has 98 free questions with answers and covers the hand tools and power tools everyone owns and nobody thinks about: how old the hammer really is, where the screwdriver was invented, why a Phillips head cams out, who patented the Robertson and Torx drives, what a spirit level is filled with, and why the chainsaw was originally a surgical instrument. It also covers the brands and inventors behind the toolbox: Black & Decker's pistol-grip drill, Stihl, Vise-Grip, Leatherman, the Swiss Army knife, WD-40's real name, duct tape's wartime origin, Stanley, DeWalt, Makita, Snap-on and Craftsman. Easy questions suit workshop and pub quizzes; the harder ones on patents and dates will test tradespeople and DIY obsessives. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The oldest known stone tools, about 3.3 million years old, were found beside Lake Turkana in which country?
Kenya
Kenya's Lomekwi site turned up when a survey team took a wrong turn in 2011; its flakes and anvils are about half a million years older than the earliest known fossils of our own genus, Homo.
Q 02Which Tanzanian site, where Louis and Mary Leakey dug for decades, gave its name to the earliest widespread stone-tool tradition?
Olduvai Gorge
Olduvai Gorge gave the Oldowan its name after Louis Leakey found the simple choppers there in the 1930s; the Leakeys' later finds in the gorge drew public attention and money for a wave of new East African digs.
Q 03The modern jigsaw was born in 1946 when a Swiss engineer fitted a saw blade to which household appliance?
A sewing machine
A sewing machine belonging to Albert Kaufmann's wife gave up its needle for the blade; his employer Scintilla sold the result as the Lesto jigsaw from 1947, and Bosch later bought the firm.
Q 04The Phillips cross-head drive is known for which tendency when the torque gets too high?
Camming out
Camming out means the driver rides up and out of the recess as torque rises; whether Phillips intended that is disputed, but the later Pozidriv was reshaped to grip harder and resist it.
Q 05Which carmaker tried Henry Phillips's new cross-head screws on its 1936 assembly lines, before its rivals followed?
General Motors
General Motors tried the screws on its 1936 Cadillac because the cross recess centres a power driver by itself; nearly every American carmaker had switched by 1940.
Q 06The square-socket Robertson screw is especially common in which country?
Canada
Canada kept Peter Robertson's square drive largely to itself: Henry Ford found it saved time on Model Ts built in Windsor, Ontario, but Robertson would not license it, so Ford's American plants went without.
Q 07Which screw drive, introduced in 1967, is recognised by its six-pointed star-shaped recess?
Torx
Torx was introduced by Camcar Textron in 1967; a tamper-resistant version adds a post in the centre of the star so that an ordinary driver cannot get in.
Q 08The hex key is best known by which brand name, trademarked by a Hartford, Connecticut, toolmaker around 1910?
Allen
Allen was William G. Allen, whose 1910 patent covered cheap cold-formed set screws with a hexagonal socket, sunk flush so that no head stuck out; his firm sold them as Allen safety set screws.
Q 09What do the British, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders call a wrench?
A spanner
A spanner is what Britons throw 'in the works' where Americans throw a wrench; in American English the word survives only for a special wrench with a hook or pin.
Q 10The Swedish toolmaker Bahco credits which inventor with the modern adjustable wrench?
Johan Petter Johansson
Johan Petter Johansson patented his design in Sweden in the early 1890s and took out over 100 patents in all, yet Americans call the same tool a Crescent wrench, after the firm that later patented it there.
Q 11Edward Abbey's 1975 novel about eco-saboteurs in the American Southwest takes its title from which tool?
The monkey wrench
The monkey wrench of The Monkey Wrench Gang gave sabotage in defence of wild land the name 'monkeywrenching', and the novel openly inspired the founders of the activist group Earth First!
Q 12Vise-Grip, patented by a Nebraska blacksmith in 1924, was the first of which kind of tool?
Locking pliers
Locking pliers were patented in 1924 by William Petersen, a Danish-born blacksmith in De Witt, Nebraska; an over-centre lever clamps the jaws shut, so they hold without being squeezed.
Q 13A precursor of the modern chainsaw was developed around 1830 by Bernhard Heine for what purpose?
Bone surgery
Q 21What does the name WD-40 stand for?
Water Displacement, 40th formula
Water Displacement, 40th formula records the 40th attempt at a rust-preventing solvent by San Diego's Rocket Chemical Company in 1953; Convair first used it on Atlas missile skins, and it was never patented.
Q 22Which company's Revolite division developed the waterproof cloth tape of World War II that became duct tape?
Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson made the tape for the US military, which wanted a strong waterproof cloth tape to keep moisture out of ammunition cases; peacetime builders later wrapped heating ducts with it.
Q 23Which spiral wood-boring bit with a screw point is traditionally turned in a brace?
Bone surgery came first: Heine's osteotome was a hand-cranked chain of small cutting teeth, and two Scottish doctors had already used a simpler chain saw in the 1780s, decades before anyone felled a tree with one.
Q 14Which company patented an electric chainsaw for logging sites in 1926 and a petrol one in 1929?
Stihl
Stihl was Andreas Stihl's firm, but a rival beat him to petrol power: Emil Lerp's Dolmar built the first petrol chainsaw in 1927, two years before Stihl's own.
Q 15The first handheld electric drill was built in 1895 by Fein, a company founded in which country?
Germany
Germany's Fein built it in Stuttgart, but without the pistol grip and trigger switch now taken for granted; an American maker patented those in 1917.
Q 16Which Baltimore-born company patented the pistol-grip, trigger-switch electric drill in 1917?
Black & Decker
Black & Decker, founded in a Baltimore machine shop in 1910, patented the pistol-grip drill in 1917 and later built cordless tools for NASA's Gemini and Apollo programmes.
Q 17Which company began making Swiss Army knives in Ibach, Switzerland, in 1891?
Victorinox
Victorinox grew from Karl Elsener's Ibach workshop, which began supplying the army in 1891; the very first Swiss Army knives had come from a German firm in Solingen, because no Swiss maker could produce enough.
Q 18Who popularised the English term 'Swiss Army knife' in place of the German Offiziersmesser?
US soldiers after World War II
US soldiers after World War II found the knives on sale in their Post Exchange stores, took them home as souvenirs by the thousand, and gave them a plainer English name than Offiziersmesser.
Q 19What was Tim Leatherman trying to repair on a 1975 trip when he thought up his multi-tool?
A Fiat 600 car
A Fiat 600 car kept breaking down as he and his wife Chau crossed Europe on a budget; with only a scout knife to hand he kept wishing it had pliers, and spent the next eight years getting one made.
Q 20Leatherman Tool Group is based in which US city?
Portland, Oregon
Leatherman Tool Group has been in Portland, Oregon, since 1983, the year the outdoor retailer Cabela's ordered 500 tools and ended Tim Leatherman's years of rejection letters.
Auger bit
An auger bit is shaped like a corkscrew for a reason: its long spiral twist carries the shavings up and out of the hole as it bores.
Q 24Why is a spirit level called a 'spirit' level?
Its vial is filled with alcohol
Its vial is filled with alcohol, long known as spirit, because alcohol will not freeze and crack the glass as water could; the bubble trapped inside does the measuring.
Q 25The 'plumb' in plumb bob comes from the Latin word for which metal?
Lead
Lead is plumbum in Latin, the root of both 'plumb bob' and 'plumber'; the dense metal makes a compact weight that pulls the line straight down.
Q 26Which Greek mathematician is said to have boasted that with a lever and a place to stand he could move the world?
Archimedes
Archimedes' boast comes down through later writers; Plutarch adds that when King Hiero challenged him to prove it, he sat on the shore and hauled a laden three-masted ship towards him with pulleys.
Q 27Which kind of wrench lets a mechanic tighten a bolt to a set force and no further?
Torque wrench
A torque wrench signals when the chosen force is reached; Conrad Bahr, who patented a ratcheting one in the 1930s, is said to have wanted the flange bolts on water mains tightened evenly.
Q 28Pierre Vernier's sliding scale of 1631 is best known today on which tool?
Caliper
The caliper carries his idea into every workshop, yet Vernier devised it for a quadrant, an instrument for measuring angles.
Q 29Tabitha Babbitt, credited with inventing the circular saw in 1813, belonged to which religious group?
The Shakers
The Shakers of Harvard, Massachusetts, counted Babbitt among them; she reputedly attached a circular blade to her spinning wheel after watching men waste half their effort on the pit saw's return stroke.
Q 30'Sawzall', the generic American name for a reciprocating saw, was which company's trade name?
Milwaukee Electric Tool
Milwaukee Electric Tool rose from the ruins of a firm wrecked by a factory fire, whose assets A. F. Siebert bought in 1924; its Sawzall of 1951 was the first portable hacksaw with a back-and-forth blade.