A catalog of the Derby, Ball, Edwards Corporation, which was established in 1920. The company changed its name to Derby & Ball, Inc. in 1933, placing this catalog within that window of time. A .PDF of this catalog can be found in its entirety here.
An original photograph by Fotograms of New York City. The back contains the pasted typewriter text:
PLEASE CREDIT FOTOGRAMS, N.Y.
CHAMPION GIRL SCYTHE SLINGER CUTS WIDE SWATH.
HELEN BERNABY, CHAMPION GIRL SCYTHE SLINGER. 19 YEARS OLD, WAS UNTIL A DAY OR TWO AGO, WAS CHAMPION MOWER OF NEW HAMPSHIRE, EVEN OVER ALL THE MEN, THIS YEAR, A 65-YEAR OLD VETERAN WITH GNARLED HANDS, THAT HAVE BEEN TRAINED IN THE SHUFFLING SWING OF A SCYTHE THREE TIMES AS LONG AS HELEN’S REDEEMED THE RPIDE [sic] OF MASCULINE NEW HAMPSHIRE, BY DEFEATING HELEN, HELEN IS AN ALL-ROUND ATHLETE, AND SHE HOPES TO TURN THE TABLES NEXT YEAR.
The year prior to when this photo was taken, a New York Times article was written celebrating her victory. Be forewarned that the article is “of its time” and contains remarks that reflect the then-present biases against her Italian heritage. This original photo appears to have received some artistic enhancement to compensate for the brightness and contrast of the negative, having outlines painted in to enhance the edges of the collar, her arm, and folds of her garments, as well as the top of her head.
A thin, folded price list and illustrations of the wares offered by David Wadsworth & Son of Auburn, New York. In contrast to companies like Rixford who produced a well heat-treated but inconsistently forged product, David Wadsworth & Son items tend towards exemplifying extreme precision in their work, most blades of theirs in good condition showing remarkably crisp lines for tools produced by open die hand forging.
A wonderful brad-bound catalog and price list, with large glossy pages. Because of the method of binding, the pages appear off-center when isolated, but appear centered when viewed in their bound state.
A three-hole-punched leaflet acting as an abbreviated catalog of Rixford’s wares. This may have been a supplement to an existing catalog, but the composition seems to imply that it was intended as a stand-alone document. Of interesting note is the “Mighty Atom scythe” mentioned as one of the items not depicted, as it describes it as not only being especially lightweight, but that it was available in both American and European “shanks” which we take to indicate as the tang. We have never seen a blade of American form with a European style tang, which would be quite unusual. However, as they are shown listed adjacent to “genuine Swedish scythes” of “Austrian pattern” it seems very likely that they were not the original manufacturer of these, and instead were importing them, possibly from Redtenbacher of Austria.
One of the largest and most notable snath manufacturers, and the only surviving of them all to the modern day. This catalog is mostly likely circa ~1931-1935 due to the inclusion of insert prints of the Ironclad snaths which were patented in 1931, meaning that the earliest issue date was post-patent, but before they formally released catalog No.24. Printing catalogs was quite costly historically, so the norm was to produce them only when changes to the selection, pricing, and other relevant information had become so out of date as to necessitate a new issue. This catalog was likely printed prior to September 22, 1931, but issued within a few years of that date, such that the Ironclad snaths were a recent loose-leaf addition. We apologize for the heavier watermarking on this catalog than on many previous, but due to the wide prevalence of Seymour’s snaths and past instances of people cropping our archived images for eBay listings without proper credit, we’ve had to resort to this approach to prevent commercial abuse of a free resource made available thanks to large amounts of time and money spent in their acquisition and hosting. Watermark-free images are on-hand in our personal files, and we’re happy to negotiate access to them for fellow researchers’ non-commercial use.
Back in the 1960’s, researchers discovered that wood could be plasticized by use of treatment with ammonia gas in a pressure chamber. The ammonia would dissolve the hydrogen bonds between the lignin and the cellulose fibers, allowing the fibers to slip past one another, and enabling extreme bends to be made. When the ammonia evaporated out of the wood, fresh hydrogen bonds would form, setting the bend permanently in place as if the wood had grown that way. In the 1970’s through the present, some experiments have been done regarding the process, but it has yet to meet with any commercial application, mostly due to the difficulty of safely obtaining, storing, handling, and using deadly, corrosive anhydrous ammonia gas.
Meanwhile, woodworkers agree that kiln dried wood is difficult to bend, and that air-dried is the way to go if attempting to make steam-bent wood products. However, many parts of the world are unable to reasonably source air-dried stock and are forced to make do with kiln-dried. Many have discovered that adding a little household grade aqueous ammonia solution (1-3% concentration ammonium hydroxide) to their steam generator helps with bending kiln-dried wood. Ammonia fuming is a common woodworking technique to darken high-tannin woods like oak, and while stronger concentrations work faster, low concentrations have been found to still produce equal results if exposure time is lengthened. This, combined with stumbling across this 2015 study by an Iraqi university, combined to indicate to us that aqueous ammonia could be used as an effective wood plasticizer, significantly reducing the risks involved with working with the ammonia.
We have begun to experiment with treating wood with a 29% ammonium hydroxide solution, and the results are quite promising. Historically snath manufacture has been a costly process, with the steam bending resulting in a very high breakage rate. With good quality ash wood in scarcer supply than ever before thanks to the emerald ash borer, methods for reliably producing the complex bends of a scythe snath are the needed if a traditional or semi-traditional wooden American snath is to remain in production. Now that we’ve developed a soak tank and functioning method for producing a bend that forces compression, we will need to manufacture more clamps to produce the full 3D curvature needed for a finished snath and refine our drying methods to reduce checking due to the rapid evaporation rate of the ammonia.
A lovely vintage catalog by the organization that would later become Falci Tools of Italy. Falci themselves consulted with the oldest still-living man who worked for them and based on some of the patterns named after towns, which are now mere villages, and concluded that this catalog dates from the very early 1900’s.
This catalog shows that an astonishing array of both scythes, grass hooks, and other tools were still being produced in Oakland, Maine at this late date by the industry giant. Of interesting note is that this catalog is spiral-bound, having been printed in the first year that such a binding was available. The date of publication was ascertained due to an Iron Age ad with a known date asking retailers to write to request their “new” catalog No. 117, though this catalog was likely issued to the retailer within a few years after initial publication due to the inclusion of additional loose leaflets and stamped corrections for discontinued products within the main body of work.
A collection of writings on edged tools from the folks at Baryonyx Knife Co.
