Viewers of The Repair Shop will have marvelled at the skill of the experts gathered in the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Chichester, West Sussex.
Many of the episodes include restoration (or even rebuilding) of precious keepsakes by metalworker Dominic Chinea, who joined the show in series two. An advocate of age-old craftsmanship, drawing and working by hand if possible, his passion for all things mechanical has driven him to release a new book: Machines: A Visual History.
Starting with the six ‘simple’ machines – the inclined plane, the wedge, lever, screw, wheel and axle, and pulley – Dominic presents 100 machines which have paved the way for so much we rely on today, often without thinking about it. As Dominic says, “Each of the machines featured represents a remarkable achievement. It means that someone has had a vision and gone on a journey of discovery, finding the courage and self-belief to see it come to life … Whatever the reason for their creation, each of the 100 machines I’ve chosen for this book are unique accomplishments.”
The latest issue of Sorted includes an extract from Machines: A Visual History, showing three of the machines contained within this fascinating homage to all things mechanical. Here is just one – although it might set your teeth on edge – the dental drill.
“Ah, the dreaded dental drill. Astonishingly, dentistry was being practised by the Indus Valley Civilization in 7000 BCE, in what is now Pakistan. Teeth estimated to be over 9,000 years old, have been found, with concentric grooves consistent with some form of a specialised bow drill used to hollow out tooth cavities.
Just to put this date into perspective, earthenware – the first kind of pottery – only dates back around 9,000 years, and rice was only cultivated from around 5700 BCE. That gives us a window into how much our ancestors valued sorting out dental problems.
We have to jump forward to the 19th century to the next major development, and that was the drill invented by the British dentist George Fellows Harrington in 1864. It was called Erado, which is Latin for “I scrape out”, and was powered by a clockwork mechanism – operated by a key – that was wound up and then released, which gave the dentist two minutes of drilling time. It was the fastest dental drill in existence at the time, and Harrington came up with all sorts of developments, including interchangeable heads and cleverly angled handpieces for those hard-to-reach areas. It wasn’t a huge success, though – it was hard to control, not to mention noisy, and was overtaken by a more efficient machine a few years later. Harrington’s Erado is in the Science Museum in London and it’s incredibly beautiful, with its silver cylinder engraved with intricate floral decorations and velvet-lined walnut case. Everything was so well considered. It actually looks more like a fine watch than a drill.
In 1872, the American dentist James B. Morrison adapted the foot treadle from a sewing machine to develop a foot-operated dental drill, which could reach 2,000rpm, but this had the slight drawback of needing either the dentist, or an assistant, to keep working away at the treadle. Everything changed when the first electric drill was designed by the American dentist George F. Green. Suddenly, there was a drill that could maintain drill-speed and didn’t need two people to operate it. In case you’re wondering about the pain relief options at the time, nitrous oxide (laughing gas) had been used in dentistry since 1844, thanks to the experiments of the American dentist Horace Wells. He famously had his assistant, John Riggs, extract one of Wells’s teeth while under nitrous oxide. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.
I’ve got various dentist’s tools in my workshop because they’re small, precise, durable, very well made – and perfect for delicate metalwork. I was using one recently to remove a clutch plate from an old Triumph motorbike. Some crafts are so well established that they have very specific small tools, like horology and lutherie (stringed instrument-making), but the rest of us have to be resourceful, think outside the box and adapt. Craftspeople like Lucia Scalisi (our painting conservator) and Kirsten Ramsay (our ceramics conservator) from The Repair Shop have all sorts of dentist’s tools in their drawers.
I had a dentist’s appointment soon after researching dentist’s drills for this book, and I couldn’t help myself asking her all sorts of questions about what type of drill bits she used, whether they were high-speed steel drill bits, or carbon. And she loved being asked (I’m guessing it doesn’t happen that much) and told me all about them. As with many crafts, there are very specialist manufacturers who produce these super-precise machines for every dental operation. They actually use very similar rotary tools to the pneumatic die grinders that I use in metalworking.”
MACHINES: A Visual History by Dominic Chinea, illustrated by Lee John Phillips, is available now, DK Books £25. Get your copy HERE
Photo: Jack McGuire
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