PART 1 A HISTORY OF HAMMERS
Was the hammer the first tool? Because timber, bone, and ivory all decay and the first stone hammers were unshaped, no one is sure. However, hammers may even predate humans as a number of animals use hammers — for example, chimpanzees and sea otters — not to mention animals with ‘built-in’ hammers such as woodpeckers and mantis shrimp.
Certainly, human hammers were very early because of their simplicity, usefulness and versatility. These features continue to ensure the ubiquity of hammers today — as evidenced by the rarity of a home that does not hold at least one hammer.
Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a structure that has not been constructed without a hammer. Building in brick, canvas, cob, concrete, straw bale, tyres, metal, mud, or wood all require at least one hammer. Even with nail guns, hammers are still a primary tool on construction sites.
Not just in building
However, hammers are used far beyond building. They are critical to working in stone, metal, timber and glass as well as in medicine (reflex testing and orthopaedics), cooking (pestle, meat tenderising and nut cracking), warfare (clubs, maces, and firearms), sport (hockey, tennis, and cricket), toys (too many to mention), communication (bells, gavel, and jungle drums), ceremony (the mace carried in parliamentary and university processions) and music (bells, pianos, and triangles).
Even defining ‘hammer’ is like trying to define a primary colour. Almost everyone instinctively recognises the colour blue and a hammer, but a definition is complicated. Take, for example, two Wikipedia definitions of a hammer:
“A hammer is a simple force amplifier that works
