Before the ratchet, there was only suffering.
Entire cars sprawled across shop floors like dying beasts. Locomotives leaked steam from split seams. Axles snapped in mud holes deep enough to swallow men whole. The machines were bigger than their makers, heavier than anything they could lift without rope and pulley, and far less forgiving.
Lewis Hine, 1920. Power house mechanic working on steam pump.
Down in the grit and smoke, mechanics fought them with whatever they had. A wrench in hand. Hands numb from cold or slick with sweat. Turn the wrench a quarter turn, maybe less. Lift it off. Reposition. Turn it again. Over and over, sometimes for hours. The wrench would slip. Knuckles would split. Blood wiped off on the legs of coveralls. No drama. No complaints. It was just the way it was.
This was life for the machinists, the blacksmiths, the field mechanics, car mechanics, and the factory men. Hard people, working under lantern light on dirt floors, breathing the oily smoke of boilers and forge fires. What they were fixing was just as cruel as the work itself. Steam engines that wanted to explode. Little or non existent hardware standards. Even when the tools fit, the hardware fought to stay where they were. Rusted. Seized. Rounded. Snapped. That bolt you cannot reach, the one that only turns ten degrees at a time with an open-end wrench? We've all been there. That was every bolt, every day, for these men.
Somewhere deep in the middle of all that misery, someone finally said: "enough".
They built a tool so simple, so perfect, that most of us forget how much of our car life still rides on the back of it. A handle. A socket. A little mechanism inside that lets you swing your hand without ever letting go.
Nobody remembers J.J. Richardson. No statues. No plaques. No museum wings filled with reverence. But in 1863, deep in the steam of the Industrial Revolution, Richardson filed U.S. Patent No. 38,914 for something almost laughably simple: a wrench with a gear inside it.
The patent drawings showed a long iron shaft with a wooden handle and a square drive opening at the end. Instead of pulling the wrench off the bolt to reset for another swing, a gear and pawl mechanism let you work it back and forth in place. The gear itself was rough by modern standards, coarse and primitive, with somewhere around a dozen teeth. That meant you had to swing the handle wide, probably thirty degrees or more, just to catch the next tooth. In tight spaces, it was better than nothing, but not by much.
The wrench was not lightweight or nimble. It was fourteen inches long and weighed nearly three pounds, built more like a piece of farm equipment than a precision tool. Inside, two pawls engaged the teeth of a ratchet gear, driven by a flat spring that tried its best to keep tension on them. The tolerances were loose. The action was rough. With a heavy socket on the end, there was no mistaking that every movement was a small mechanical battle.
Ratcheting mechanisms were not new. The basic idea, a gear that moves freely in one direction and locks in the other, dates back centuries. As early as the Sui Dynasty in China, engineers were using primitive pawl and gear systems to control mechanical clocks. These devices, known as escapements, used a pawl to regulate the rotation of a gear wheel one notch at a time, allowing for accurate timekeeping through a series of controlled mechanical pulses. The principle was known, but nobody had thought to drag it out of temples and clock towers and put it into the busted knuckles of industrial life.
In the chaos of the Second World War, it found a new and far deadlier stage. British bomb disposal units carried a special ratcheting spanner known as the Quilter. Its job was simple and terrifying, slowly unthread the fuse rings from unexploded bombs. No wide swings. No slipping off a bolt and whacking your knuckles. Just tiny, patient movements, measured in clicks you could not afford to rush. Ratchet or die. The same basic principle Richardson patented for turning bolts was now buying men their lives, one cautious turn at a time.
Richardson’s invention cracked the door open, but for decades afterward, the ratchet stayed a rough tool. Improvements came slow. Materials were inconsistent. Metallurgy was primitive compared to today. Cast parts often had impurities that weakened them. Early steel varied wildly in strength and toughness from batch to batch. Machining was mostly done by hand or on early belt driven equipment, meaning tolerances were loose, fits were sloppy, and wear came quickly. Most mechanics and field workers stuck with the fixed wrenches they knew because early ratchets were not much better than a good set of knuckles and a lot of patience.
Not that people did not try to "improve" things. Push wrenches showed up, where you jammed a handle forward and hoped the bolt turned instead of your wrist. It absolutely did not work. Gearless ratchets that were nothing like the ones we use today promised zero backlash and delivered zero reliability. Cam and lever wrenches clamped onto bolt heads with all the precision of a bear trap, mangling fasteners so badly the next guy would hunt down your family. Some inventions were so bad they disappeared before anyone even had the chance to throw one across the shop in disgust. Real progress took time.
By the early 1900s, the picture started to change. Companies like Walden-Worcester and Blackhawk Manufacturing out of Milwaukee started refining ratchet designs beyond rough farmer grade tools. Walden's early production ratchets were some of the first to offer a truly reliable swing in a reasonably compact size. Blackhawk pioneered quick release mechanisms and finer tooth counts well before Snap-on even showed up. Duro Metal Products, Cornwell Quality Tools, and even Hinsdale Manufacturing were all grinding out American made ratchets before the glamour brands took over the marketing. These companies meant it. Walden promised "Tools That Fit" when fitting was still a luxury. Blackhawk called their line "Tools with a Future" when most wrenches barely survived the week. Duro proudly sold tools "Built to Take It." They knew what they were selling. They knew who was buying.
Snap-on, founded in 1920, was not the first to invent the ratchet, and they were not the first to refine it either. What they did better than anyone else was rethink how mechanics carried and used their tools. Their breakthrough was modularity: sockets and handles that snapped together, making toolkits lighter, more adaptable, and faster to work with. It was not about shouting louder. It was about solving a different problem. After that, they outworked everyone else. They built a system around the tools, factory trained mobile dealers who brought the best gear straight to the shop floor. They understood that a good tool sold itself once a mechanic put it in his hand. It was not just marketing. It was a better way to work, and they rode that wave all the way to the top.
None of it happened overnight. World War I and II accelerated tool development because every second saved on a repair could mean a plane got back in the air or a tank rolled back onto the battlefield. In the mud of Europe and the Pacific, a broken vehicle was not an inconvenience. It was the difference between living and dying. Ratchets became essential, not optional. War. The greatest fulcrum for progress in human history. The trenches did not care how clever your ratchet was. They only cared if it worked.
By the middle of the twentieth century, no serious mechanic would be caught without one. What started as a clunky compromise in a world of stubborn bolts had grown up into a fundamental piece of every mechanic’s arsenal. The click was here to stay.
After the wars, there was not much left to invent. Materials got better. Teeth got finer. Handles got stronger. But outside of late night TV gimmicks the heart of the ratchet stayed the same. A simple machine built to do one thing and do it well. Some versions are electric now. Some are air powered. Some are engineered down to absurd tolerances for space flight and surgical use. But the core idea, the thing Richardson scratched down onto patent paper more than 160 years ago, has not changed.
Today a ratchet is so common it is invisible. Tossed into the back of trucks. Forgotten in the bottom drawer of tool chests. Left out in the rain at a junkyard, only to be found by you. A little rougher. A little rusted. But still ready to turn one more stubborn bolt, just like it always has. The same suffering, made a little bit easier, click by click.
