Coes monkey wrench. US patents July 6, 1880 and July 8, 1884
A monkey wrench is a type of smooth-jawed adjustable wrench, a 19th century American refinement of 18th-century English coach wrenches. It was widely used in the 19th and early 20th century. It is of interest as an antique among tool collectors and is still occasionally used in practice.
More broadly, a monkey wrench may be a pipe wrench or any other kind of adjustable wrench.[1]
Etymology and history
Monkey wrench (left) compared to Stillson or pipe wrench (right)
Adjustable coach wrenches for the odd-sized nuts of wagon wheels were manufactured in England and exported to North America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were set either by sliding a wedge, or later by twisting the handle, which turned a screw, narrowing or widening the jaws. In 1840, Loring Coes, a knife manufacturer in Worcester, Massachusetts, invented a screw-based coach wrench design in which the jaw width was set with a spinning ring fixed under the sliding lower jaw, above the handle. This was patented in 1841[2] and the tools were advertised and sold in the United States as monkey wrenches, a term which was already in use for the English handle-set coach wrenches.[3] Published reports from 1834 and 1840 show the term in use (and indicating by the absence of explanatory glosses that the term was not unfamiliar).[4]:42[5]:211 The origin of the name is not entirely clear, but Geesin (2015)[6] reports that it originated in Britain with a fancied resemblance of the wrench's jaws to that of a monkey's face, and that the many convoluted folk etymologies that later developed were baseless.[6] Before the Bahco/Johansson/Crescent type became widespread in the United States, during the industrial era of the 1860s to the 1910s, various monkey wrench types were the dominant form of adjustable wrench there. During that era, a very wide and popular range of monkey wrenches was manufactured by Coes family partnerships, licensees and companies, which filed further wrench patents throughout the 19th century. Some Coes wrenches could be bought with wooden knife handles, recalling the company's earlier knives. In 1909, the Coes Wrench Company advertised a six-foot-long "key" wrench, shaped like a monkey wrench, for use on railroads.[7][8] The Coes wrench designs were acquired by the toolmaker Bemis & Call of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1928. After 1939, its successor companies manufactured monkey wrenches from Coes designs until the mid-1960s, a production run of over 120 years.[3][9][10]
In German Language the wrench is called "Engländer" which means "Englishman". It is thought to be called so because it was useful for the less common imperial ("English") screws and nuts in continental Europe when only metric open-end or ring wrenches were available.
Monkey wrenches are still manufactured and are used for some heavy tasks, but they have otherwise been mostly replaced by the shifting adjustable wrench/spanner, which is much lighter and has a smaller head, allowing it to fit more easily into tight spaces, and the tooth-jawed, torque-gripping pipe wrench.
False etymologies
Charles Moncky myth
The following story was widespread from the late 19th and early 20th centuries:
That handy tool, the "monkey-wrench", is not so named because it is a handy thing to monkey with, or for any kindred reason. "Monkey" is not its name at all, Charles Moncky, the inventor of it, sold his patent for $5000, and invested the money in a house in Williamsburg, Kings County, where he now lives.[11][12]
Although this story was refuted by historical and patent research in the late 19th century,[3] it appears to have been inspired by a real person. A Charles Monk (not Moncky) lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the 1880s where he made and sold moulder's tools, not mechanics' tools like a monkey wrench.[13] He could not have invented or named the monkey wrench because he was born after the term first appeared in print.[13]
Racial slur myth
A story on social media claims that the African-American boxer Jack Johnson invented the wrench while in prison, and the wrench was named "monkey wrench" as a racial slur. However, both the first patent for a monkey wrench and the name predate Johnson's birth. Johnson did, however, receive a patent for improvements to it.[14][15]
Culture
The largely US idiom "to throw a monkey wrench into (something)" means to sabotage something, equivalent to the British English "to throw a spanner in the works". A "left handed monkey wrench" is sometimes used as ironic humor, as monkey wrenches are ambidextrous.
↑ Select Committee on Steam Navigation to India, Parliament of the United Kingdom (1834), Report From the Select Committee on Steam Navigation to India: With the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index. Ordered, by The House of Commons, to be Printed, 14 July 1834, Parliament of the United Kingdom, retrieved 30 April 2023, PACKAGES. Box No. 1. — A tierce, containing 1 pair purchase blocks with snatch blocks and fall, straps, brasses, gibs and cotters for cast cross bars, cotter for bottom of connecting rod, 2 ladles, soft soldering tool, soft solder, brazier's solder, a monkey wrench, hemp for packing, 40 duplicate paddle plates, 4 picks for cleaning boiler, duplicate brass excentric ring, 2 screwed ends with nuts for ditto, 5 calking chisels, 6 steel drifts, 8 stitched packages for valves, 80 hooked paddle bolts. […] Liverpool, 18 July 1832. (signed) Fawcett, Preston & Co.
↑ Whishaw, Francis (1840), "Liverpool and Manchester Railway", The Railways of Great Britain and Ireland, Practically Described and Illustrated, London, England, United Kingdom: Simpkin, Marshall and Company, retrieved 30 April 2023, Every engineman shall have with him at all times in his tender the following tools; and in the event of any of them being lost, he shall immediately get the same replaced, viz.: — A complete set of screw-keys, one large and one small monkey-wrench, three cold chisels and a hand-hammer, one crow-bar, one long chain and two short coupling-chains with hooks, two spare ball-clacks, a quantity of flax, gaskin, and string for packing, &c.; oil-cans, large and small plugs for tubes. N.B. The engineman to be responsible for the above tools.
1 2 Geesin, Ron (2015), The Adjustable Spanner: History, Origins and Development to 1970, Crowood Press, ISBN9781785000362.
↑ "'The Monkey Wrench' mill building at 143 Main St. in Springfield, MA". Archived from the original on 2 March 2022. Retrieved 1 June 2022. Bemis & Call was acquired by a larger tool company in 1939. By the 2000s their old mill building on Main Street in the South End housed a commercial center known as "The Monkey Wrench."
An adjustable spanner, shifting spanner, English wrench (Turkey) or adjustable wrench is any of various styles of spanner (wrench) with a movable jaw, allowing it to be used with different sizes of fastener head rather than just one fastener size, as with a conventional fixed spanner.
A screwdriver is a tool, manual or powered, used for turning screws.
A wrench or spanner is a tool used to provide grip and mechanical advantage in applying torque to turn objects—usually rotary fasteners, such as nuts and bolts—or keep them from turning.
A torque wrench is a tool used to apply a specific torque to a fastener such as a nut, bolt, or lag screw. It is usually in the form of a socket wrench with an indicating scale, or an internal mechanism which will indicate when a specified (adjustable) torque value has been reached during application.
Johan Petter Johansson, sometimes known as JP, was a Swedish inventor and industrialist. He invented a modern adjustable spanner. He obtained over 100 patents in total.
A pipe wrench is any of several types of wrench that are designed to turn threaded pipe and pipe fittings for assembly (tightening) or disassembly (loosening). The Stillson wrench, or Stillson-pattern wrench, is the usual form of pipe wrench, especially in the US. The Stillson name is that of the original patent holder, who licensed the design to a number of manufacturers; the patent has since expired decades ago. A different type of wrench with compound leverage often used on pipes, the plumber wrench, is also called a "pipe wrench" in some places.
A socket wrench is a type of spanner that uses a closed socket format, rather than a typical open wrench/spanner to turn a fastener, typically in the form of a nut or bolt.
British Standard Whitworth (BSW) is an imperial-unit-based screw thread standard, devised and specified by Joseph Whitworth in 1841 and later adopted as a British Standard. It was the world's first national screw thread standard, and is the basis for many other standards, such as BSF, BSP, BSCon, and BSCopper.
A cheater bar, snipe, or cheater pipe is an improvised breaker bar made from a length of pipe and a wrench (spanner).
A hydrant wrench is a tool used to remove fire hydrant caps and open the valve of the hydrant. They are usually adjustable so as to fit different sized hydrant nuts.
A plumber wrench is a form of plier described as a pipe wrench that uses compound leverage to grip and rotate plumbing pipes. Similar to the action of a Vise Grip plier, its jaw opening is adjusted to width by rotating a threaded ring. Its advantage is that it grips with significant force without needing to engage a lock nut like an adjustable tongue-and-groove plier. Like these, it can also be used on nuts, particularly hex shaped, and other flat engagement points. If used carelessly it can dent or break plumbing pipe.
Locking pliers are pliers that can be locked into position, using an "over-center" cam action. Locking pliers are available with many different jaw styles, such as needle-nose pliers, wrenches, clamps and various shapes to fix metal parts for welding. They also come in many sizes.
A screw is an externally helical threaded fastener capable of being tightened or released by a twisting force (torque) to the head. The most common uses of screws are to hold objects together and there are many forms for a variety of materials. Screws might be inserted into holes in assembled parts or a screw may form its own thread. The difference between a screw and a bolt is that the latter is designed to be tightened or released by torquing a nut.
Channellock is an American company that produces hand tools. It is best known for its pliers—the company manufactures more than 75 types and sizes of pliers—particularly its eponymous style of tongue-and-groove, slip-joint pliers. Its pliers have distinctive sky-blue handle grips; the company has been using the same trademarked shade of blue since 1956.
Parrot pliers are a type of slip-joint pliers. They are also known as:
Bahco is a Swedish brand within the hand tool industry, which is now part of SNA Europe, part of Snap-on. Its roots go back to the industrial revolution in Sweden in the late eighteen hundreds, starting with innovations such as the pipe wrench and the modern adjustable wrench. Since then, the product range has expanded with a total assortment of products that today includes over 7000 hand tools.
Coes Wrench Company was a tool manufacturing company based in Worcester, Massachusetts. The company was originally part of the L. and A. G. Coes & Co.
Loring Coes was an American inventor, industrialist and Republican politician who invented the screw type wrench, commonly known as the monkey wrench and who served as a member of the Worcester, Massachusetts City Council and Board of Aldermen, and as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1864–1865.
A hex key is a simple driver for bolts or screws that have heads with internal hexagonal recesses (sockets).
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