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| A set of metric spanners or wrenches, open at one end, box/ring at the other. Commonly known as “combination” spanners. |
Diligent daughter and I were answering some trivia questions and one question asked for the British equivalent of the American word 'wrench'. The answer is 'spanner', but where did that word come from? Wrench we can kind of understand because the word wrench refers to a sharp twist or pull, which is kind of how you operate a wrench - you wrench it. But where does spanner come from? My theory is that it originated back in the day, back in England, when precision machining was becoming a reality. Used to be that nuts and bolts were hand made, and if a wrench was needed to tighten a nut, a wrench was made for that nut. But when precision machining came along, all of sudden all the nuts and bolts came in standard sizes. So if you had a wrench that fit one nut, it would fit all the other precision made nuts of the same standard size. And how would you know it you had the correct wrench? Because it would span the width of the nut and no more, therefor it was the correct span.
America didn't have a big tradition of hand made nuts and bolts. Precision made parts came along about the same time as the country was founded so we didn't have to worry too much about odd sized stuff, you just grabbed the spanner of the correct size and started wrenching.
That's my theory. I did find this on Wiktionary:
4. (obsolete) A device in early steam engines for moving the valves for the alternate admission and shutting off of the steam.
It kind of fits with my theory.
3 comments:
In my experience a spanner is a particular type of wrench used for some collet or bearing ring nuts or any nuts of that type, round with machined slots, usually 6, at intervals. Some spanner wrenches fit a specific nut and would engage 3 or more slots, others engaged a single slot and would fit a range of nut sizes. The single slot type would cause excess wear of the slots and the "nub" of the wrench, especially if a spanner was used on a nut beyond its intended size range. I often see old spanner wrenches at flea markets and fully half of the nubs are either worn to the point of uselessness or have been reshaped with a grinder or file. I also see homemade spanners, usually made out of the handle of another wrench, ground or filed into a crude spanner shape.
The wrenches in your photo are indeed "combination". They appear to be a normal length and offset. Combination wrench sets are available in long, short (normally called "stub", or "stubby"), socket end, ratchet end, swivel end in both socket and ratchet. Some sets may have different offsets to either the open or box end though these are rare.
The term spanner may have referred to any wrench in some era or in some specific geographic areas, but I've been familiar with this specific type of wrench since I was a child. And that was a while ago.
....and
Collins dictionary says
“ Word origin: from German, from spannen to stretch”
.......and
“ Can you be a cog in the system and a spanner in the works?
The Guardian (2016)”
I grew up in Canada and many of my young friends had British parents. Since I hung with a nerdy crowd, I was exposed to nerdy parents. The gearheads among them used the word "spanner" exactly as we would use the word "wrench".
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