What is a wooden dowel you ask? It may look like a simple wooden peg, and to be honest, it is. But, like many other tools that seem completely insignificant on the surface, dowel rods have undoubtedly changed history.
Today, they are used to hold everything together, from ships to bookshelves, but they also claim much deeper historical significance. The wooden dowel has been used for centuries to hold our things together and, for better or worse, it is the things around us that have carried us as a people throughout history. Read on to learn more about the wooden dowel and how a completely invisible and seemingly harmless tool is more important than we think.
A piece of wood, a piece of history
The word dowel comes from the Middle English equivalent of doule, meaning “part of a wheel”, which also seems to originate from the Middle Low German for dovel, for “plug”. Despite being a possibly mundane tool, wooden blocks have been used in a variety of ways throughout history, earning them a place in the metaphorical “hall of fame” when it comes to tools and technologies that they have remained useful throughout the centuries.
690 AD: A traveler visits a famous shrine in Ise in Japan and recounts the tradition of building shrines every 20 years according to specific ancient beliefs that call for the use of pegs and interlocking joints instead of nails.
1000: Leif Ericson rowed and sailed across the North Atlantic, from Norway to Newfoundland, in a solidly built Viking ship of overlapping planks held together with wooden dowels and iron nails.
1394: Master mason Henry Yevele rebuilds Westminster Hall, including a 660-ton hammerbeam roof. This roof was not supported from below and was held up only by the laborious use of wooden blocks.
1509: Reports reach the west of ships from Southeast Asia that are built of tropical timber and wooden blocks with the ability to sail to the eastern tip of Africa, enabling trade in “Ming dynasty” vases and glassware from the ones we hear today.
1641: When a Dutch fleet sank in the Sargasso Sea, survivors fashioned lifeboats out of wooden studs and recounted how their capsized ships failed when the wooden nails and spikes holding them together disintegrated. Following this, the Dutch king built a ship that was made entirely of wood, fully incorporating hardwood studs.
1954: A ship was discovered in Egypt supported entirely by tenon rods, indicating the use of tenons throughout history.
As you can see, tacos have been used throughout history to hold our world together. Look around. How do you take advantage of this piece of history every day?