JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

So, at first glance, this chart may look like a simple statement of nut and bolts specs. The importance of this chart is its commonplace appearance, and the overt statements about what all of these size and parameters should be, establishing a common denominator, a standard. Even though nuts and bolts had been around for at least 400 years when this chart appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in 1864 (and threaded bolts and screws long before that), the idea of standardization of this hardware really hadn’t taken place until Joseph Whitworth gave the idea life in 1841. The nut and bolt industry was well underway, except that for X manufacturers there could be X-number of varieties of nut and bolt sizes from one location to another (near or far), which made things difficult for the end-user, as they could basically be using a proprietary design with their hardware. Standardization made it possible to buy a certain size nut in one country and mate it with the necessary bolt from another country (etc.) with the capacity of knowing that one will fit the other, which is a big deal. In any event, here’s a table of a U.S. attempt to codify those dimensions. 

        [See: W.R. Wilson,  The History of the Nut and Bolt Industry in America, 1905.]