THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 13, 1996 TAG: 9604130003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Put a handle, sideways, on a wheel, and what have you got?
A nifty mechanical workhorse: a crank.
Conventional wisdom argues over whether fire or the wheel or splitting the atom were the biggest deals in the history of human discovery. The waggish amongst us argue for sliced bread.
Lately I've been thinking about one of the innovations on the serious side - that crank. Not a candidate for the greatest world-changer, I know, but still a pretty remarkable step in human progress.
I was reading the other day about how the Chinese came up with the crank, some hundreds of years before the device made an appearance in Europe. That simple idea of a handle on a wheel made it possible to direct human muscle power in newly useful directions. For instance: With a large wheel and a handle that two hands could grasp, one Chinese worker could turn a fan (now there's another neat apparatus) large enough to blow the chaff off quite a batch of hulled wheat.
This set me mulling some of the productive and interesting applications of the crank principle down through the years. I soon realized that the wheel-with-a-handle (or versions without an actual wheel but involving the same winding motion) had shown up in far too many places to enumerate, and in some places, undoubtedly, I haven't even heard about.
But a few simple examples are readily cited.
One that made a big impression on me, way back, was the automobile crank, used for the first Model T Fords and some other early cars to kick the engine over (if the crank didn't kick the cranker back and - according to one widely cited possibility - break his arm) with enough force and speed to get the car running on its own.
And then there have been the familiar crank-driven grinders - coffee and street organ (monkey-accompanied), to mention a couple.
Old-fashioned ice cream freezers are fondly, if wearily, remembered.
Going back to automobiles, cranks came in handy for many a year in raising and lowering windows.
And how about fishing reels, where the cranking has been fun, and grandfather clock winders, where the cranking has been a chore?
Hand winches of various kinds have also carried on the tradition of crank usefulness - like those serving various purposes on boats or the contrivance used on trailers for easing pleasure craft into and out of the water.
Granted, power equipment seems to have ended the reign of the hand crank in a great many cases - just about all of the above in fact, except for some of the tall clocks and the fishing reel.
But the ingenuous wheel-with-a-handle has sure saved a lot of labor in the long period of its ascendancy.
And despite all the motorized food-whippers and stirrers, I'll bet that in many a kitchen - like ours - there's still on some shelf or in some drawer an example of the crank at its basic best: a plain old hand-propelled eggbeater. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB