tool

tool, an instrument for making material changes on other objects, as by cutting, shearing, striking, rubbing, grinding, squeezing, measuring, or other processes. A hand tool is a small manual instrument traditionally operated by the muscular strength of the user, and a machine tool is a power-driven mechanism used to cut, shape, or form materials such as wood and metal. Tools are the primary means by which human beings control and manipulate their physical environment.

A brief treatment of tools follows. For full treatment, see hand tool and machine tool.

The oldest known tools—consisting of primitive hammers, anvils, and cutting tools—were discovered in 2011 and 2012 at the Lomekwi 3 site located in a dry riverbed near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. Found in a layer of rock dating back approximately 3.3 million years, during the middle of the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago), the tools predate the emergence of the oldest confirmed specimens of Homo by almost 1 million years. Paleontologists speculate that, barring the discovery of an as-yet-undiscovered species of Homo, the tools were likely constructed by members of Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus, who inhabited the region at that time.

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The next oldest tools, found in Ethiopian rocks dating to approximately 2.6 million years ago—the traditional start of the Paleolithic Period, or Old Stone Age—are thought to have been made by H. habilis. That collection was made up of variously sized examples of the pebble tool, or chopper. The chopper typically consisted of a water-worn fist-sized rock, which had been chipped away at one end to create a roughly serrated edge. It was used for cutting through the skin and sinews of animals captured during hunting. The chopper was used by humanity for almost two million years, until the appearance of the hand axe, a superior version of the chopper. In that tool the entire surface of the rock was worked. Because both faces were chipped, the edge of the hand axe was considerably sharper than that of the earlier chopper.

Between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago, Neanderthals evolved. Excellent toolmakers, the Neanderthals used many different types of hand axes, as well as the first borers, knives, and spears. The heavily serrated blades were sawlike, allowing them to be used for carving and cutting horn, bone, and wood.

Cro-Magnons, the first modern humans, appeared between 45,000 and 30,000 years ago and brought into existence new types of tools. Chief among those were the burin, or graver, this being a strong, narrow-bladed flint able to scrape narrow incisions into bone, which made possible the manufacture of needles, hooks, and projectiles. The most-significant later innovation of the period was hafting, or the fitting of a handle to a tool. Knives without handles are merely awkward, but axes or hammers without them are almost impossible to use effectively.

The Neolithic Period (New Stone Age) occurred at different times around the world but is generally thought to have begun sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 bce, when the first ground and polished tools were made and plant and animal domestication commenced. Grinding stone tools makes them stronger and gives them an even cutting edge; the growth of ground tools enabled Neolithic axe-wielders to clear forests for agriculture, fuel, and shelter. Three thousand years later, however, the stone axes of the Neolithic Period began to give way to the first tools made from metal, usually beaten copper. Centuries later, people learned how to smelt copper and, much afterward, iron, and the use of metal tools spread throughout the world. For the first time, tools with designs approximating current usage were made, largely because the relative ease of ironworking made it possible for individuals to have specialized tools for particular tasks.

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Modern hand tools were developed in the period after 1500 bce. They are now generally considered in the following classes: percussive tools, which deliver blows (the axe, adz, and hammer); cutting, drilling, and abrading tools (the knife, awl, drill, saw, file, chisel, and plane); the screw-based tools (screwdrivers and wrenches); measuring tools (ruler, plumb line, level, square, compass, and chalk line); and accessory tools (the workbench, vise, tongs, and pliers).

With the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century, humankind discovered how to drive tools mechanically. In particular, machine-driven tools became necessary to manufacture the parts for the machines that now made goods formerly produced by hand. Most common machine tools were designed by the middle of the 19th century. Today, scores of different machine tools are used in the workshops of home and industry. Those are frequently classified into seven types: turning machines; shapers and planers; power drills; milling machines; grinding machines; power saws; and presses.

The most fundamental of all seven is the horizontal metal-turning machine called the lathe, which is employed in a vast number of turning, facing, and drilling operations.

Shapers and planers use single-point tools to machine flat surfaces. Shapers move the cutting tool back and forth over the material, peeling away the surface, whereas planers have stationary tools, and the surface is moved to encounter them. Power drills are usually known as drill presses and have a twist drill that cuts holes in metal and other substances. They can also be used for many of the countersinking, boring, tapping, and other purposes for which lathes are frequently used.

Milling machines have rotating cutting surfaces that abrade substances with which they come into contact. In standard milling machines, a sliding table with a workpiece on top is pushed against the whirling cutter. Grinding machines function in a similar manner, except that the cutter is replaced by a spinning abrasive disk called a grinding wheel or by a belt. The most accurate of all machining processes, grinding can create metal surfaces within 0.0001 inch (0.0025 cm) of the desired dimension.

Power saws frequently consist of long thin moving belts or chains lined with teeth, as in band saws or chain saws. Presses are used to ram material against a hard surface; the surface often consists of a die, and the action of the press is to stamp out metal or plastic beaten into the shape of the die.

Some materials and metal alloys are too hard or too brittle to be machined by conventional tools; for those materials, several nonconventional methods have been devised. In electron- or ion-beam machining, a stream of highly energized electrons or ions is directed against the workpiece. In electrical-discharge and electrochemical machining, an electrical charge passing through a liquid medium across a tiny gap dissolves material from the workpiece. In ultrasonic machining a vibrating tool causes a liquid abrasive medium to remove material. Other nonconventional methods are laser, plasma-arc, chemical, photochemical, and water-jet machining.

Automatic machine tools can produce parts repetitively without operator assistance. Computer numerical control creates fully automatic machine-tool systems by feeding the machines instructions that have been reduced to digital or numerical values.