Hammer

A hammer is a tool, most often a hand tool, consisting of a weighted "head" fixed to a long handle that is swung to deliver an impact to a small area of an object. This can be, for example, to drive nails into wood, to shape metal (as with a forge), or to crush rock. Hammers are used for a wide range of driving, shaping, breaking and non-destructive striking applications. Traditional disciplines include carpentry, blacksmithing, warfare, and percussive musicianship (as with a gong).

Hammering is use of a hammer in its strike capacity, as opposed to prying with a secondary claw or grappling with a secondary hook. Carpentry and blacksmithing hammers are generally wielded from a stationary stance against a stationary target as gripped and propelled with one arm, in a lengthy downward planar arc—downward to add kinetic energy to the impact—pivoting mainly around the shoulder and elbow, with a small but brisk wrist rotation shortly before impact; for extreme impact, concurrent motions of the torso and knee can lower the shoulder joint during the swing to further increase the length of the swing arc (but this is tiring). 

War hammers are often wielded in non-vertical planes of motion, with a far greater share of energy input provided from the legs and hips, which can also include a lunging motion, especially against moving targets. Small mallets can be swung from the wrists in a smaller motion permitting a much higher cadence of repeated strikes. Use of hammers and heavy mallets for demolition must adapt the hammer stroke to the location and orientation of the target, which can necessitate a clubbing or golfing motion with a two-handed grip.

The modern hammer head is typically made of steel which has been heat treated for hardness, and the handle (also known as a haft or helve) is typically made of wood or plastic.

Ubiquitous in framing, the claw hammer has a "claw" to pull nails out of wood, and is commonly found in an inventory of household tools in North America. Other types of hammers vary in shape, size, and structure, depending on their purposes. Hammers used in many trades include sledgehammers, mallets, and ball-peen hammers. Although most hammers are hand tools, powered hammers, such as steam hammers and trip hammers, are used to deliver forces beyond the capacity of the human arm. There are over 40 different types of hammers that have many different types of uses.

For hand hammers, the grip of the shaft is an important consideration. Many forms of hammering by hand are heavy work, and perspiration can lead to slippage from the hand, turning a hammer into a dangerous or destructive uncontrolled projectile. Steel is highly elastic and transmits shock and vibration; steel is also a good conductor of heat, making it unsuitable for contact with bare skin in frigid conditions. Modern hammers with steel shafts are almost invariably clad with a synthetic polymer to improve grip, dampen vibration, and to provide thermal insulation. A suitably contoured handle is also an important aid in providing a secure grip during heavy use. Traditional wooden handles were reasonably good in all regards, but lack strength and durability compared to steel, and there are safety issues with wooden handles if the head becomes loose on the shaft.

The high elasticity of the steel head is important in energy transfer, especially when used in conjunction with an equally elastic anvil.

In terms of human physiology, many uses of the hammer involve coordinated ballistic movements under intense muscular forces which must be planned in advance at the neuromuscular level, as they occur too rapidly for conscious adjustment in flight. For this reason, accurate striking at speed requires more practice than a tapping movement to the same target area. It has been suggested that the cognitive demands for pre-planning, sequencing and accurate timing associated with the related ballistic movements of throwing, clubbing, and hammering precipitated aspects of brain evolution in early hominids.

History

The use of simple hammers dates to around 3.3 million years ago according to the 2012 find made by Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University, who while excavating a site near Kenya's Lake Turkana discovered a very large deposit of various shaped stones including those used to strike wood, bone, or other stones to break them apart and shape them. The first hammers were made without handles. Stones attached to sticks with strips of leather or animal sinew were being used as hammers with handles by about 30,000 BCE during the middle of the Paleolithic Stone Age. The addition of a handle gave the user better control and less accidents. The hammer became the primary tool used for building, food, and protection.

The hammer's archaeological record shows that it may be the oldest tool for which definite evidence exists.

Prehistoric and ancient archaeology

The hammer, a metal or stone tool with a handle usually made of wood, has existed since the beginning of human intelligence, applied to metallurgy. However, to ensure the cutting of flint, obsidian or other vitreous or hard rocks into thin and sharp blades, hammerstones, artifacts sketching a hammer shape made of animal wood or bone, are commonly used. It is illusory to want to separate these ancient hammerstones made of hard stone, bone, animal wood from the first hammers with a mass or metal head or even mallets or large wooden mallets of similar shape. 

Paleolithic times already distinguish a hammer of pure striking force from the simple struck object becoming a concrete hammer, burin, chisel, wedge, chase, stake, pile, point etc. like the couple formed by the thrower/propulsor and the spear /lance. Effective dolerite hammers have been discovered on the site of the pyramid of Menkaure. 

Already in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the Bronze Age, more than 5000 years ago, the easy hammering of copper and gold seems to have been mastered, craftsmen and metallurgists used the hammer, or even the hammer-pointer combination, for example to dig in copper and tin mines. The temples of Babylon were adorned with enormous statues of gold, silver, iron and wood: the metal colossi correspond to massive works with a wooden core, covered with metal blades worked with a hammer. These simulacra wearing a crown on their heads and a scepter in their hands could be animated, or even have a mobile tongue, according to Baruch, actually moved by the Chaldean priests from hidden springs.

The iron tool with a handle was used to beat metals, to forge: it was used in all eras as the blacksmith's main tool. The hammer and the anvil are in the Greco-Roman world the attributes of the god of Etna Vulcan / Hephaestus and of the Cyclopes. In the eastern Mediterranean, appearing to emanate from the first Peoples of the Sea, the Cabiri deities, qualified by epithets marking strength, vigor, power, are represented by robust dwarves armed with a hammer. If Herodotus assimilates them to sons of Hephaestus, the Phoenicians grant them the invention of navigation, considering them as gods who protect ships and preside over their construction. Their images at the stern of Phoenician triremes bore in ancient Greek the name pataīkoï, which could be related to the verb patassô, "to strike with a hammer". 

The Campanian excavations at Pompeii, devastated by the pyroclastic eruption of Vesuvius around 79 AD, revealed the widespread Roman carpenter's tool for driving and pulling out nails, the claw hammer. The flat side of its head is the striking surface, and the other side, with its rounded pickaxe or crowbar-shaped profile, provides leverage, thanks to its slot that allows the head of the nail to be wedged in. By the 1st century, nail forging was a common activity within the Greco-Roman world, which had largely assimilated Celtic metallurgy and carpentry, as evidenced in its northern margins by the approximately 900,000 nails unearthed in the fortress of Inchtuthil, and there was a range of hammers for striking, hammering, and beating metals, not to mention the battle axe-hammer of the Roman legions. The invention of the nail, that is, a point with a shaped head, and the mathematical knowledge of the lever divulged by Archimedes after the siege of Syracuse would date back to the years 260 to 250 BCE.

History of the hand tool of craftsmen and industrial tools of large forging hammers

During the Middle Ages, its use developed; the master carpenter of wooden construction used this tool, in the form of a mallet or a mass often made entirely of wood, to drive in small pieces of pointed wood, substitutes for the nail or the dowel, similar to a pushed tenon whose initial hole or mortise is made with a wood chisel, and to ensure the assembly of the boards. At this time, different hammers were also used to shoe horses. The name febvre, a variant of homo faber or medieval ironworker working near anvils, brought together cutlers, edge-tool makers, blacksmiths, locksmiths and farriers. A host of familiar sayings have been passed down to us from this distant medieval corporation, which marked surnames: "Between the hammer and the anvil, you must not put your finger".

Let us remember the association of the hammer and the anvil, dating back to the ancient world and extending beyond the contemporary era. An anvil made of iron or cast iron, less expensive in modern times, must make the hammer bounce with force and thus produce a clear and silvery sound. If this is not the case, restoration is necessary: the anvil was heated in a box full of cement, then quenched with a stream of fresh water to avoid annealing its surface. Cement is a specific charcoal, ground very finely into dust, like that used for steelmaking by cementation. If this maintenance operation is still possible for large forge anvils, it is not for hammer anvils weighing 8 to 10 tons.

The varieties of anvils of modest sizes and varied shapes according to the trade are often called "tasseau", "tassel" or "bigorne". The bigorne consists of a metallic mass of cast iron or iron, presenting various lateral shapes from the pyramid to cone-shaped points and especially a central part in the form of a table, the top of which is steeled and tempered, in the case of the bigorne iron mass. The associated tools which strike on it are the front hammers, the full cross hammers, the bigorne hammers etc. The small bigornes weigh between 7 and 10 kg, the large bigornes 10 to 20 kg. Émile Littré attached the word attested in the 14th century, to the etymon "bicornis", meaning "which has two horns", to specify that its striking ends are pointed. 

The verb bigorner, used in the 17th century, does not only mean "to forge on the bigorne", but "to round a small or large piece of metal on the bigorne, to turn a piece of metal into a circle". However, there are a multitude of forms depending on the profession of tinsmith, edge-tool maker, wheelwright, plumber, jeweller, goldsmith, shoemaker, cooper etc. The bigorne personalized in jewelry is even designed to carry out the hallmarking of precious metals by simple striking, the official or unofficial hallmark being engraved on a part of the bigorne.

In metallurgy, the hot hammering of the iron ingot, called salmon, loupe etc. when it came out of the blast furnaces, represents a crucial operation and ensures the resistance of the beaten metal by eliminating the various residual slags and by re-welding the parts of metal. The divided material thus expelled from the block of struck and beaten iron formed the scaling.

In modern metallurgy, sheet metal is a more or less thick sheet of iron or steel obtained by rolling. The palâtre designates the sheet metal beaten into thin sheets by the old blacksmiths. The crenellated rod is a metal bar which is not yet trimmed and which still bears the hammer blows of roughing. The trousse in metallurgy designates either a bundle of steel bars intended to be forged together, or a significant number of sheets of beaten iron folded in two. Flattening a bar with hammer blows makes it possible to obtain a blade. The flatteners, workers who flattened the bars in the workshop called a flattener or "platinerie", became rare with the establishment of flatteners and rolling mills. The flattener was an instrument used to flatten iron or any other metal, while the flattener is a forging device composed of cylinders, between which the operator passes the iron bars to lengthen or flatten them.

Heavy hammers powered by hydraulic power appeared with various beaters or clappers in the 11th century, particularly for fulling textiles. These easily versatile devices could also pound, grind, crush, etc. various materials or harvested fruits to be processed. A martinet, a variety of large rocking hammer, associated with a mill, is attested in 1116 in Issoudun. The lexicon of these ancient machines illustrates an old complicit association of the blacksmith and the carpenter, to design a frame controlling the mobility of the increasingly enormous masses of metal. 

The soucherie designates the framework of the equipment of a large forge hammer. The hammer spring is the piece of wood and iron fixed at one end and acting as a spring to raise the handle of a large forge hammer. The ordon is the frame of a large forge hammer, which has come to be called the whole hammer, its frame and the device intended to operate it. The prince is the main part of the ordon while the amount of the ordon is the block of stone supporting the ordon of a large forge hammer. The drome is the strong piece of wood forming part of the assembly which supports the hammer of a large forge. The court-carreau is the vertical piece connected by the drome to the large attachment of the forge hammer. The culart in foundry only designates a part, set back, of the equipment of a large forge hammer. 

The rabat, in metallurgy, is the beam articulated on a pivot at one of its ends and placed above the large hammers and cingling hammers, so as to spring and fold them down onto the anvil. The margason is the mortise where the hammer handle fits, in a Catalan forge. The brée is the iron fitting of a forge hammer handle. The verb démarguer means in metallurgy to remove and unhinge the hammer, and by extension, to remove any tool, such as the hammer, from the notch that holds it. The hulse, also called hurasse or cogue, is a large cast iron ring, often with journals, in which the end of the handle of a lifting or rocking hammer is placed or passed and which contains the axis of rotation of this hammer,.

Around the 1400s, the hammer became the essential tool of shoemakers, who used it to soften leather and for various uses common to the different leather trades. Peasants never used a scythe without an implement called battements: this was a hammer and an anvil of modest size and easily portable, to beat the scythe. In Velay, the pair formed by the hammer and an anvil is called by a curious plural, the hammers. The use of various hammers is very common in the rural world, in the many forges, on the carpenter's sites, in the workshops of wood craftsmen or metalworkers, like the makers of bells who know how to strike the manufactured piece, to give it a suitable timbre and the desired note, even in the various workshops adjoining households etc.

Miners', quarrymen's and stonemasons' hammers are available in large numbers. The batterand, in a quarry or at the bottom of the mine, is a hammer used to drive wedges into the rock. The "smille", attested in 1676, is a two-pointed hammer with which the quarryman pricks the rubble to regularize the faces. This operation was called smillage during construction sites in 1846. The rural world has long retained for stone cutting, the hammer called "layer", "laye", "layes" or even the bretelé hammer or brette hammer, with a two-sided head, pointed and sharp on one side, serrated on the other. Flint cutting required flaking the stone, that is to say, detaching flakes of flint using a double-pointed hammer to make flint. The cannonball cutter scrapes the sand from the casting envelope, breaks the jets, removes the casting and the drips with a "rifle cutter". He can finally re-beat the cannonball with the hand hammer.

After the appearance of the blast furnace in the 15th century, the forge, while remaining the blower furnace for hot metalworking, became the workshop where steelworkers treated cast iron to transform it into malleable iron and hammered the resulting metal, while hot, to give it different shapes. Forging iron pieces consists of giving precise shapes to the metal by working it with fire and a hammer. In particular, cold forging corresponds to working iron without heating it beforehand. Hammering corresponds in metallurgy to the work of beating metals hot or cold to forge them and give them the outline of their final shape. This work is carried out in a hammer mill, a forge workshop where the iron is worked with a hammer. Iron made with a hammer can support 35 kg per square millimeter without breaking, while iron simply rolled in a rolling mill can support at best only 30 kg ＜. 

Wrought iron is iron worked with a hammer on an anvil. A battery is an old factory where iron is beaten and stretched to make sheets. The adjective écrané describes iron passed under the hammer after the second heating. Drawn iron describes a piece of iron that has stretched after being beaten while hot. Refouler le fer consists of beating the iron until red hot with heavy hammer blows. Molders and founders push back with a hammer. Work-hardened iron has been made brittle by cold hammering. Work-hardening a metal refers to the verb écrouir, meaning "to pass a metal through a die or beat a metal cold to make it denser and more elastic.

In the industry, we must mention the front hammers, rocking or lifting hammers driven by a water mill like the old drome hammers, the martinets, the ordon hammers, the lifting hammers of yesteryear or by a motor like the pile drivers, large forge hammers where the heavy mass acts vertically, operating with steam, compressed air or electricity. According to the industry standards in 1860, large forge hammers are called "martinet" if the striking mass of the device is less than 60 kg. If the mass is greater than 60 kg, then they are front hammers or lifting hammers. A martinet is a rocking hammer, driven by a cam wheel, controlled by any motor, and which is used in large forges to beat iron. The lifting hammer is a large hammer of a particular shape. A front hammer, simply called the front in metallurgy, is similar to a large forge hammer. It is a large mechanical lifting hammer used in forges to strike iron burls. 

All these hammers or forge hammers must not be raised too much by the cams, otherwise, not striking correctly at the right distance, they are called "riding hammers". A series of rams or hammers arranged on the same line and operating simultaneously forms a battery. The bogue, sometimes also called ring or hurasse, designates in metallurgy a large ring with trunnions fixed to the handle of the lifting hammers. The art of foundry contributes to the equipment and installation of large hammers: the hulse or hurasse is a cast iron ring through which the end of the handle of a lifting or rocking hammer passes, the chabotte is a large piece of cast iron serving as a base for the anvil of a power hammer.

Industrial forging after 1850 changed the traditional definitions: cinglage is the operation of driving out, either by compression or by hammering with a drop hammer, the slag contained in an iron loupe resulting from refining or puddling, and thus increasing the density of the metal. The iron loupe is a mass of iron melted and cingled on the hammer. In metallurgy, the verb cingler now means to forge or corroy iron using machines called cingleuses. Only the artisanal domain gradually remains, evolving towards quality or luxury, from farriery or edge-tool making to artistic ironwork. For the army, iron bullets were still hammer-forged in dies called "etampes", but this operation was too expensive after 1865,. It then only remained for 12 mountain howitzers with a diameter of 26.5 cm, close to the 120 mm guns.

Mass was partly synonymous with hammer in the 19th century, not only designating a heavy mallet for driving wedges into wood to be split by lumberjacks or a heavy quarrymen's hammer. It represented various hammers of varying shapes, from the many hammers used by miners, carpenters, joiners, wheelwrights, plumbers to sculptors' hammers, for roughing out marble. To split large logs or roundels, the rural world has long kept, associated with wooden or iron wedges, the mass, a large iron hammer square on both sides with a wooden handle, very similar to a quarryman's sledgehammer and retaining a versatile use, while rural carpenters always designated by this word a large wooden mallet.

It was only during the 19th century that its most widespread use developed, driving nails, tacks or setting rivets in metal. The rise of construction, particularly metal construction and mechanization, mining and the railway industry, and later the automobile industry, was one of the driving forces behind its spread. Hundreds of specific hammers were patented, notably between 1867 and 1941 for the claw hammer alone. Most specific hammers, such as forging hammers, were purchased in hardware stores. From bank teller's hammers to cancel checks by percussion, before using a perforator, to small nail hammers for billboards, box makers' hammers or those of cigarette makers to close a wooden cigar box, to surgeons', dentists' or doctors' hammers from the end of the 19th century, the tool often marks an era.

At the time when the hammer became a symbol of industrial work, the word tended to be inserted into compound nouns designating machine tools acting by percussion: power hammer, jackhammer, hammer drill, stamping machine called embosser or embosser etc. With the development of embossers or powerful presses, beaten iron, which is nothing other than stamped iron and passed through the press, opened the way to the rapid and inexpensive manufacture of various objects. The embossing machine is in principle made up of a hammer with a rounded head with which sufficiently malleable metals are shaped by successive impacts and compression.

The pneumatic hammer, invented by Charles Brady King in 1890 and presented at the Chicago World's Fair, consists of a piston powered by compressed air, which allows striking a tool,. The released compressed air pushes the piston forward, which is attached to a hammer here. This technology also allows the installation of rivets by pneumatic riveter, the caulking of ships with metal hulls, etc. This technical invention, immediately applied in construction, mines and quarries, shipbuilding and automobiles, marks an era of economic growth, in search of productivity. Since its slow improvements and the invention of machines including hammers until today, its usefulness has grown considerably and it seems not to dry up.

The hammer of institutions

The hammer is also a tool for marking defined time, for the benefit of the institutional order, open or closed, deliberative or transitory, or of a transaction. The hammer of the auctioneer of a legal sale or of the adjudicator of goods, in practice very often a small mallet which strikes a plan, a table or a desk, recalls the hammer of justice which ratified with a brief blow the decision or the justice rendered.

Heir to the ancient gruarii, old Gruyères, forest ranger of private domains or forest officer under seigneurial or royal obedience, the body of waters and forests has kept the use of specific hammer in iron or steel, the large end of which bears a mark in relief, which is printed by striking at the right height of the trunk, cleaned or flattened by the long blade, sometimes a sort of hatchet, in opposition to the first which hammers,. Forest hammering consists of notching the bark or forming a smooth surface, with the head side of the hammer acting as a hatchet, and marking with the flat side the referenced code of the owner and/or the felling order on the smoothed or exposed surface of the trunk.

In urban markets, the hammer juror or tanned leather juror was the official overseeing these foreign trade transactions, as guardian of the hammer used to mark the fairground leathers. Wholesalers of skins and furs also mark their purchases or productions.

The hammer on a religious level announces a cycle of liturgical ceremonies, often by authorizing the opening of a new passage. The opening of the jubilee or holy year in Rome began with a singular ritual: the pope as sovereign pontiff or, failing that, the dean of the cardinals who represented him, seized a golden hammer, struck three blows on a chosen walled door, pronouncing the consecrated words "Aperite mihi portas justitiae..." (Let the doors of Justice open before me...) then announcing the Catholic theme chosen for the period. Once this ritual was completed, the religious procession gave way to the craftsmen, masons, stucco workers or decorators, who concretely knocked down the wall and prepared the new door.

The expression "battre monnaie" which means striking the blanks using the balance, or a device which replaces it, to produce the impression, comes from the time when coins were made with a hammer. The matrices, punches or monetary molds, preserving the negative of the impression in hollow and relief, were the object of a vigilant guard, unlike the striking hammer not without value, but interchangeable. The mechanic Brucher, also called Aubry Ollivier or his diminutive Aubin Olivier, invented around 1550 the coinage with the mill or balance. This modern technique was however abandoned in 1585 for the coinage with the hammer. It was not until 1645 that the techniques with the balance were revived by Jean Varin, a skilled medal engraver of Liège origin, appointed general keeper of coins by Richelieu. 

The brayer was a small iron hammer, used to operate the pendulum of coins. The equipment then evolved towards the use of presses. The large hammer called "bouard" or "bouvard" in use in the manufacture of coins between 1585 and 1645 left a lexical trace, with the verbs "bouarder", meaning to strike with the bouard or even more precise "bouer" to strike with the bouard blanks arranged in a pile, and the adjectives "bouardé" (bouarded coins) or "boué" applied to blanks, according to the old process,. Correctly mudded blanks are well flattened, joined, coupled, so that they can be cast by count or by hand. According to the precepts of the royal ordinance, the blanks had to be mudded three times before returning them to bleaching. Pierre Larousse points out that the mint worker still used the hammer in the middle of the 19th century to straighten warped or blown blanks, which would not pass through the setting hand of his press.

An incuse coin in numismatics appears with a strike of the same type on both sides, obverse and reverse, in hollow and in relief. This may be an error due to the negligence of the operator, or a voluntary choice of manufacture ("incuse factory coins").

Construction and materials

A traditional hand-held hammer consists of a separate head and a handle, which can be fastened together by means of a special wedge made for the purpose, or by glue, or both. This two-piece design is often used to combine a dense metallic striking head with a non-metallic mechanical-shock-absorbing handle (to reduce user fatigue from repeated strikes). If wood is used for the handle, it is often hickory or ash, which are tough and long-lasting materials that can dissipate shock waves from the hammer head. Rigid fiberglass resin may be used for the handle; this material does not absorb water or decay but does not dissipate shock as well as wood.

A loose hammer head is considered hazardous due to the risk of the head becoming detached from the handle while being swung becoming a dangerous uncontrolled projectile. Wooden handles can often be replaced when worn or damaged; specialized kits are available covering a range of handle sizes and designs, plus special wedges and spacers for secure attachment.

Some hammers are one-piece designs made mostly of a single material. A one-piece metallic hammer may optionally have its handle coated or wrapped in a resilient material such as rubber for improved grip and to reduce user fatigue.

The hammer head may be surfaced with a variety of materials including brass, bronze, wood, plastic, rubber, or leather. Some hammers have interchangeable striking surfaces, which can be selected as needed or replaced when worn out.

Designs and variations

A large hammer-like tool is a maul (sometimes called a "beetle"), a wood- or rubber-headed hammer is a mallet, and a hammer-like tool with a cutting blade is usually called a hatchet. The essential part of a hammer is the head, a compact solid mass that is able to deliver a blow to the intended target without itself deforming. The impacting surface of the tool is usually flat or slightly rounded; the opposite end of the impacting mass may have a ball shape, as in the ball-peen hammer. Some upholstery hammers have a magnetized face, to pick up tacks. In the hatchet, the flat hammer head may be secondary to the cutting edge of the tool.

The impact between steel hammer heads and the objects being hit can create sparks, which may ignite flammable or explosive gases. These are a hazard in some industries such as underground coal mining (due to the presence of methane gas), or in other hazardous environments such as petroleum refineries and chemical plants. In these environments, a variety of non-sparking metal tools are used, primarily made of aluminium or beryllium copper. In recent years, the handles have been made of durable plastic or rubber, though wood is still widely used because of its shock-absorbing qualities and repairability.

Hand-powered

Ball-peen hammer, or mechanic's hammer

Boiler scaling hammer

Brass hammer, also known as non-sparking hammer or spark-proof hammer and used mainly in flammable areas like oil fields

Bricklayer's hammer

Carpenter's hammer (used for nailing), such as the framing hammer and the claw hammer, and pinhammers (ball-peen and cross-peen types)

Cow hammer – sometimes used for livestock slaughter, a practice now deprecated due to animal welfare objections

Cross-peen hammer, having one round face and one wedge-peen face.

Dead blow hammer delivers impact with very little recoil, often due to a hollow head filled with sand, lead shot or pellets

Demolition hammer

Drilling hammer – a short handled sledgehammer originally used for drilling in rock with a chisel. The name usually refers to a hammer with a 2-to-4-pound (0.91 to 1.81 kg) head and a 10-inch (250 mm) handle, also called a "single-jack" hammer because it was used by one person drilling, holding the chisel in one hand and the hammer in the other. In modern usage, the term is mostly interchangeable with "engineer's hammer", although it can indicate a version with a slightly shorter handle.

Engineer's hammer, a short-handled hammer, was originally an essential components of a railroad engineer's toolkit for working on steam locomotives. Typical weight is 2–4 lbs (0.9–1.8 kg) with a 12–14-inch (30–35 cm) handle. Originally these were often cross-peen hammers, with one round face and one wedge-peen face, but in modern usage the term primarily refers to hammers with two round faces.

Gavel, used by judges and presiding authorities to draw attention

Geologist's hammer or rock pick

Joiner's hammer, or Warrington hammer

Knife-edged hammer, its properties developed to aid a hammerer in the act of slicing whilst bludgeoning

Lathe hammer (also known as a lath hammer, lathing hammer, or lathing hatchet), a tool used for cutting and nailing wood lath, which has a small hatchet blade on one side (with a small, lateral nick for pulling nails) and a hammer head on the other

Lump hammer, or club hammer

Mallets, including versions made with hard rubber or rolled sheets of rawhide

Railway track keying hammer

Magnetic double-head hammer

Magnetic tack hammer

Rock climbing hammer

Rounding hammer, Blacksmith or farrier hammer. Round face generally for moving or drawing metal and flat for "planishing" or smoothing out the surface marks.

Shingler's hammer

Sledgehammer

Soft-faced hammer

Spiking hammer

Splitting maul

Strike Tack hammer

Stonemason's hammer

Tinner's hammer

Upholstery hammer

Welder's chipping hammer

Mechanically powered

Mechanically powered hammers often look quite different from the hand tools, but nevertheless, most of them work on the same principle. They include:

Hammer drill, that combines a jackhammer-like mechanism with a drill

High Frequency Impact Treatment hammer – for after-treatment of weld transitions

Jackhammer

Steam hammer

Trip hammer

Nail gun

Staple gun

Associated tools

Anvil

Chisel

Pipe drift (Blacksmithing – spreading a punched hole to proper size and/or shape)

Star drill

Punch

Woodsplitting maul – can be hit with a sledgehammer for splitting wood.

Woodsplitting wedge – hit with a sledgehammer for splitting wood.

Use

Hammers are typically used in various manufacturing applications, including breaking, striking, and shaping. A hammer can be used to drive an object into another body, such as a nail into a wall. Using a chisel or punch, the kinetic energy transformed by the hammer can be applied to the workpiece with pinpoint accuracy and precision.

Workpieces are also often shaped, for example from sheet metal during chasing or from solid iron during forging. In hammering, a narrow strip of the blade of a scythe, scythe, or sickle is driven into a very thin cutting edge by the face of a hammer on an anvil, thus sharpening the scythe.

There are also hammers that are not used for manufacturing. Their uses are diverse, ranging from purely acoustic perception in public spaces to symbolic and ceremonial use. Examples include the judge's gavel, the auction hammer (at auctions), the lodge hammer, and the foundation stone hammer. Another exception is the doctor's percussion hammer, used to test reflexes. The sport of hammer throwing in the British Isles was actually originally practiced with a blacksmith's hammer.

Variety uses of hammers

Weighted sledgehammers or heads, formerly often made of iron, red copper or steel, for hammers or sledgehammers, or of various hardwoods or with a core wound with organic protective cord such as textile rope or ox nerve, for the mallet, are today commonly made of hardened steel, forged steel, special steels with Mn, Co, Ni etc., magnetic steel to hold the nail, rod or metal point, malleable cast iron to replace hardwood such as boxwood or ash, half-hard half-soft metal, resistant composite material made of carbon fiber or graphite, colored rubber of varying hardness without rebound, based on aluminum or copper, with epoxy bonding, half-hard metal with so-called "anti-shock return" property, dense nylon, polyethylene, light Teflon, or even replaceable or interchangeable plastic tips, round and flat heads or others, for mini-hammers, light and anti-vibration material etc.

The handles, formerly usually made of beech, ash, holly, dogwood, hickory etc., sometimes of polished and luxury crafted wood, or even of iron, covered with leather, are most often 30 cm to 1 m long for ordinary hammers and sledgehammers. They can now include, in whole or in part, a frame with anti-vibration properties or have a non-slip and/or electrostatic grip surface, and be made of hardened steel, plastic or polymer materials (polyolefins, neoprene, elastomers, Teflon etc.) or composites (fiberglass, graphite etc.). In addition to flexible handles to increase the striking force, there are handles made of three materials called tri-material, steel shafts covered with plastic or bellows with a plastic face, tubular handles made of chrome steel, or even steel forged from a single piece for the whole. The handle has gripping and anti-static properties.

By their characteristic shapes, appearances or designs, hammers on the market today, as they were sometimes more than a century ago, are called: German, English, American, Australian, Italian, etc.

But in the end, leaving aside these categories, there are more than a thousand different hand hammers with a specific tool function. It is better to take a look at the situation, necessarily anchored in the industrial 19th century, hiding the previous century which saw a peak in hand tools, of the trades retaining the use of the hammer or a specific hammer, and proceeding by distinguishing the construction sector, metalworking, arts and crafts and other professions:

Major and minor works

The claw hammer, also known as a "tille" or claw hammer, can be used as a symbol of the trade. A classic carpenter's hammer has a length of 34 to 35 cm and a total mass of between 850 g and 950 g, although current materials allow for simple hammers weighing only 700 g, with various long striking heads of 16, 25 or 30 mm. But the hammer for pulling out nails, whether it is called "toothed, forked, split-peen or slotted, crowbar, or lug, is common and not at all specific. The nail-pulling hammer is found in the hands of roofers, carpenters, blacksmiths, upholsterers, demolition workers, handymen, etc. The same can be said for the simple spiked hammer. 

Driving the various spikes with the right gesture, without twisting them, is learned on the building site. The carpenter's hammer, striking with a swing, or with an arc-shaped movement, is often only suitable for small spikes. The long 20 cm spikes, used to fix thick pieces of wood on a roof, require the heavy, short-handled sledgehammer, grasped near its head, which the operator simply drops from a height of 50 cm, in a straight line, onto the head of each spike. For the connections of the wood with metal frames, legs or support feet, the carpenter or joiner may be familiar with steel riveting hammers from 30 cm to 1 m head height.

The carpenter 's hammer, lighter, with a total mass reduced to around 315 g with current materials, sometimes with a round head and peen, is often specific, like the cabinetmaker 's hammer. The carpenter's hammer, in the Aux forges de Vulcain catalogue in 1909, has an all-steel head, sometimes with a split peen, 14, 16, 18 up to 44 mm high, with an ash or service tree handle. The mallet is an all-wood hammer, used by carpenters, joiners, coopers, wheelwrights, etc.. 

The catalogue "Aux forges de vulcain" in 1909 offers mallets with barrel-shaped heads made of ash or boxwood, with the largest diameters of 4 to 10 cm, but also the "homemade mallet" called Chouanard with a bronze socket forming frets, with boxwood trim and a conical handle and mallets with a ox-strain head, screwed onto a handle-handle of 12 to 13 cm, with rollers of 65 to 120 mm, i.e. a striking length between 185 and 300 mm. The veneering hammer has a very wide blade, and is used for veneering furniture. The veneer hammer, with a head height of between 36 and 44 mm, and a single flattened blade in a long transverse plate, is used in marquetry, as well as the fretwork hammer, facilitating various fretwork operations. To facilitate attachments, there are staple hammers. Hammers for parquet floorers, carpenters laying or repairing parquet floors or continuous surface coverings in wooden strips, often smaller, have a range of head height and therefore mass, wider than that of the veneer hammer, from 14, 16, 18 up to 42 mm.

The plumber's hammer with a wooden handle has a small head length of between 20 and 35 mm, for example 22, 25, 30 and 35 mm in the Aux forges de Vulcain catalogue from 1909.

The ramponot or ramponneau is the upholsterer 's hammer. Often beautifully made, with a custom handle of around 250 mm, luxurious, sometimes in hickory, this specific hammer between 1 and 1.5 kg often has a magnetic nail holder.

The glazier 's particular hammer is called besaiguë or bisaiguë. A glazier's hammer, which varies very little, is most often made of steel, with a flat head and a nail puller.

Among the mason 's tools, we can mention the grelet, also called gurlet, a hammer with an elongated peen, the bretter hammer, the mace, a large hammer for cutting rubble, the mallet, a long-handled hammer for breaking stones, the club hammer of a similar shape, the picot also called "joint degrader", the smille pointed at both ends, etc. He also uses the bush hammer to crush cement, stone or marble ; Chopped stone refers to the stone whose facings are dressed with the bretter hammer. The decintroir is a kind of hammer with two cutting edges turned in opposite directions, which is used to spread joints in demolitions, to regularize the sides of a bay in walls, etc. It weighs between 0.9 and 2 kg in the "Aux forges de vulcain" catalog. Weighing between 1 and 2.8 kg, the double-pointed hammer, forming a sort of small pickaxe, sometimes sporting two points with a more or less fine tip, is a hammer for degrading joints. 

In construction, the excavation is the hollowing out of a stone with the punch and the hammer. The mason's hammer, which is sometimes called a demolition hammer, of classic design with a thin, elongated head, weighs between 1.5 and 2 kg, not counting its long handle of 80 cm to 1 m. The mason's hammer has a square striking head and a flat in the shape of a thick axe bit, it weighs between 2.5 and 4 kg, while the rubble picker's hammer, a tool often heavier by 3 to 4.5 kg that the mason can use for traditional constructions, only supports two thick axe bits on each side of its eye. Mason's or chimney sweep's hatchets can be described as hammers with a long, square-section striking head extended by an even longer, single, bevelled blade, the metal part weighing between 0.7 and 2 kg. The handles of the hammers, decintroils, and hatchets described generally measure between 40 and 50 cm.

In concrete or similar construction, the formwork hammer is essential for the formworker to finish the job. The scraper hammer is often made of wood. The brick hammer or bricklayer's hammer weighing between 0.7 and 1.2 kg can be useful to the bricklayer, if he does not use the end of the handle of his trowel to strike. Smaller and less thick, the chimney tiler's hammer comes in three sizes. The building demolition worker, sometimes a structural work or masonry team then responsible for rebuilding, works on construction sites with a hollow steel structure demolition hammer.

The tiler, following the mason, does not generally use a classic hammer, but a specific hammer with a tapered head and blade, or better a bat striking with an average surface area of 30 cm by 11.5 cm. The electrician's hammer, also thin and light, has a head of 16 mm, for a mass of around 200 g.

The roofer 's hammer, round at one end, pointed at the other, overall with a head curved in a portion of a circle, is often called esse, asseau, assette or aissette, this tool, more or less wide, is often personalized for right-handed or left-handed people, adapted to the stature of its owner and is held by a leather handle, a sign of comfort, sometimes incorporating a magnetic nail holder center. The roofer also uses the tille marked by a sharp face or the martelet which is a small roofer's hammer in tiles, sometimes with a tubular structure at its two ends.

The asseau, sometimes asse or assette, is a hammer whose head is curved in an arc of a circle, and has a cutting edge at one of its ends. It is used to cut and nail slates. The double-edged blade is also a specific roofer's hammer, for cutting slates or flagstones. The slate hammer, used by the slate worker or slate roofer, is used to cut the slate, to pierce it, producing a hole for the insertion of nails. The "work axe" used in slate quarries takes the form of a hammer with a head and cutting edge to detail the blocks and separate them into sheets which the operator then cuts. Quarrying slate required an art of cutting the sheets, using a small hammer or applying the sheets to supports cut with a knife.

For the old zinc plumber, the hammer could be a chisel for crushing lead, or a tool in the shape of a bat or a light wooden hammer for folding down zinc sheets on roofs and other water drains in buildings. The latter, now called a zinc roofer, is called a batter because of its function.

Among the stonemason 's hammers, let us recall the boucharde sometimes called a round or angular mallet, the laie or bretté hammer, the marteline, the mallet, a large hammer with a double square and curved pan, the polka with a simple bevel and a serrated bevel, the rusticated or rustic, the smille, etc.. A bretté or bretté hammer has a striking surface with various teeth, intended to produce lines on the material touched. 

Let us not forget the stubborn construction hammer, with a flat head and a hollow head made of cast steel, as well as the hammers called "barley grain", "barley grain and axe", "barley grains on both ends", "rustic and axe", "rustic and bretture", "dog and bretture", "stubborn and barley grain", "dog and axe", "axe on both ends" etc. Here each head or striking tip is qualified by a specific cutting or size called bréture (short blunt comb-shaped points, often between 8 and 16), rustic (longer blunt comb-shaped points, often between 8 and 16), chien (coarse square teeth), barley grain (aligned series of sharp spearhead points) etc. The stone cutter's bush hammers can have, according to the "Aux Forges de Vulcain" catalog of 1909, on their square striking surface in cast steel 16 x 25, 16 x 36, 25 x 49, 25 x 64, 36 x 64, 64 x 100 teeth. A special tempering of the head is proposed for cutting granite.

The bush hammer, which was also used by marble workers, cement workers, bitumen workers, etc., was defined in sculpture as a chisel with points and rough edges. It comes in pointed rollers or as a hammer with one or two interchangeable heads. This hammer, which allows the finishing of hard stones roughed out with a chisel, has a head cut into diamond points. The marteline is an iron hammer pointed on one side and diamond-coated on the other, used to prick and chip stone or marble without making chips. It is possible to use different chisels of similar appearance and the same name by striking them with a simple hammer. The laie can designate: i) a double-headed hammer, also called a bretté hammer, used to dress the facings of stones ii) a hammer with a single, sharp point, used to prick rubble. 

A layée stone refers to a stone that has been worked with a sledgehammer. A rusticated stone is a hammer that has flattened ends in the direction of the handle, offering tooth-shaped cutting edges, called "rustic". While a rusticated stone is one that has been chopped, dressed, and then roughly pricked with the tip of a hammer, a smilled stone is squared and roughly shaped with the tip of a hammer. Smilling is a roughing-out process applied to rough rubble and millstone. Smilling consists of prickling sandstone or rubble with a smille.

The hammer can also strike various chisels and burins to shape stone. The repulsor is a chisel or square iron of a stonemason used to "push moldings". Stonemason's pick hammers or pick hammers, made of cast steel, are often lighter, reminiscent of old miners' tools: there are some for soft stone (with three teeth or two triangular notches), for hard stone with two points, with a long palm, with two axes, axe and rustic, dog and rustic, stubborn and point. These last terms precisely qualify the generic type of cutter, the stubborn being a square striking head, the axe being a beveled striking form, the pointed point etc..

Metalworking and mechanics in general

Regarding the forging hammers of yesteryear, there are modest ones in the workshop and enormous ones in industrial installations. To manipulate the large hammers, the worker had a "hammer spring", a piece of wood or iron fixed at one end and acting as a spring to raise the handle of a large forging hammer. The lower part of a large forging hammer is called a peen. Among the smallest forging hammers, we can cite the bench hammer, type of mechanic's hammer, and the riveting hammer. The riveting hammer can weigh less than 630 g for a square or round head of 32 to 40 mm if the head and the handle are made of graphite, but if the handle is made of wood, it is around 800 g. This relatively light hammer is used for cold hammering, making rivets; it is also used by the mechanic fitter for setting rivets. The stamp is a hot riveting hammer. 

The verb "river" means to flatten or bend the head of a nail or iron pin with a hammer. The rivet is thus similar to a metal nail or peg used to join and connect two strips of sheet metal in boilermaking, carpentry or metal construction. Its ends, after assembly, are flattened with a hammer, called a riveter, at the time of installation and final fixing. The expression " river en goutte de tallow " means "to give the flattened head a rounded shape with the riveter". A riveting machine is also called a riveter or riveter.

""Sweeting" refers precisely to the expulsion of slag during the beating of the iron burl, with a hammer or a drop hammer. There were also heavy sweating/sweat hammers to accomplish or finish this work by hand. This operation, formerly meticulous and costly, in time and energy, was necessary to obtain a metal of good cohesion, the cheap or hasty manufacture of the iron rivets and tie rods of the forward part of the Titanic explains their low resistance and the rapid submersion of the hull of the ship, although compartmentalized. The flattener is a type of hammer used to flatten metals. The "front striking hammer", formerly operated in the forge by a worker called the "striker", is used to beat and strike large pieces of iron intended for the manufacture of firearms. The hand hammer, smaller than the previous one, allows the forging of medium-sized pieces in the same fabrications The hammerhead is a forging hammer with a sharp claw, the striker-forge is a large forging hammer with a long handle.

In a small, ordinary forge, the blacksmith uses a hand hammer weighing about 2.5 kg, giving 15 blows in 15 seconds and producing 10 kg of work per blow per second. If he uses a front hammer weighing about seven kilograms, for example, to stretch a piece of white-hot iron, the good hammer gives twelve hammer blows in fifteen seconds and produces an average work of 330 kg.m. Work in the forge was also carried out by several blacksmiths, with a determined rhythm and imperative coordination. The verb rabatter means to regulate in the forge the hammer blows to strike in front. The expression "rabatre en premier" is used when there are three strikers on the anvil. The expression "rabatre en seconde" when there are four strikers. The expression "rabatre court" means to strike as promptly as possible after the first strike. 

Knocking down also corresponds to the work of forming the head of a nail or, failing that, hitting a screw, dowel, key, etc. to permanently deform it and better fix it in the device made unremovable. This last operation corresponds to the verb refouler: in fact, refouler a bolt consists of pushing it into its housing by crushing the head with a hammer. A blacksmith knows that refouler becomes easy if the copper nails are first heated to red, before being quenched and cooled, so that they become much more malleable. The mechanical instrument that performs this operation is a refouleur or refouleur.

The crimping hammer is a very small hammer with a rounded part like a drop of tallow, another obtuse and which the operator uses to fold down the crimps of a garnish. The stamping hammer is mainly used to hollow out a vase on a type of mold having the same shape, and called a die: it is a large wooden hammer with an oversized tip used to give a rough shape to a flat piece. The sonnette is a hammer used to take, with a punch, a hollow impression on the matrix. The fine welder 's hammer of today could be replaced at the professional school by the tip of a hand hammer. The fine hammer for pricking welds weighs around 350 g with a wooden handle.

Hammer equipment for boilermakers, tinsmiths or sheet metal workers, formerly made of cast steel, is available as filling hammers, possibly reinforced, riveting and planing hammers, or even long riveting hammers, but also for preparatory or heavy finishing work, in steel masses of 3 kg or more or even in forged red copper masses, with heads weighing between 215 g and 4.5 kg. Special hammers complete the range: they are called "one-head stamping hammers, one-head planing hammers, planing hammers with two almost flat round heads, stepped hammers for horseshoes, hammers for narrowing or restricting, two-head planing hammers weighing either 1.1 kg, 2 or 3 kg, one-face riveting hammers, bevel hammers weighing 1, 2 or 3 kg. 

Riveting hammers and boilermaker's hammers can also be made of red copper, while hand hammers with heads weighing between 1 and 2 kg, 2 and 3 kg, and heavier hammers with heads, between 3 and 4 kg, 4 and 5 kg up to 8 and 9 kg, remain made of steel. Sheet metal workers working on shaping or other bodywork specialists straightening bodywork by hammering use hammers with heads made up of a metal mallet, mounted on rubber or silent block, to absorb shocks.

The flatter is a tool used to flatten or mat a metal surface, that is to say to make it matt, dark or frosted. The flatter is a kind of light hammer used by metal workers. In mechanics, the verb flatir has come to mean "to beat a side, that is to say each of the interior faces of a gear wheel, on the anvil to flatten it". Repoussage is work carried out with a hammer on metal plates to which the worker gives various shapes and adds ornaments. To refine his meticulous work, the metal repousser uses various chisels, called "repousseurs".

For tinsmiths, plumbers and zinc workers, there is also the postilion hammer with, conversely, a flat round head and a flat square head, the ironing hammer with either two round heads (flat and half-domed) or two flat square heads, the wider retracting hammer, the chassepot hammer, the stamping hammer with two heads, the sweating hammer, the boudin hammer, the pliers hammer, the roughing hammer with one half-domed head and another almost flat, the lamppost hammer with two domed heads, the throat hammer, the dish hammer, the gutter edging hammer, the dressing hammer with one flat head and another half-domed head, the plate hammer weighing 1.3 kg with two heads with different half-domed shapes, as well as the sledge hammer or the half-sledge hammer, whose head-forming mallets weigh 1 and 1.5 kg respectively.

Molding work uses various hammers: the robine is similar to a small wooden hammer, with a fairly wide circular head, with which the molder packs the sand into the mold.

Among the farrier 's hammers, we should mention the "pein hammer" for beating the iron, the "ferretier" or "ferratier" which he uses to prepare and place the irons, the brochoir for broaching or shoeing horses, the mallet, the front hammer, sometimes incorrectly called a stamp, etc. The farrier uses the hammer to drive in the nails which fix the horseshoe. The mallet is here a large hammer, heavier than the brochoir. The stamp refers to the punch used to drill the holes in the horseshoes he is preparing. These holes are obviously intended to pass the fixing nails through: an apprentice uses a fat stamp when he drills the holes very close to the inside edge of the horseshoe, and conversely he uses a lean stamp when he drills closer to the outside edge of the horseshoe. The verb "etamper" means to carry out work with a stamp, because the word "etamper" is polysemous, designating primarily a steel matrix producing, by pressure, hollow or relief impressions, cold or hot.

A metal part intended to produce impressions either cold or hot, the stamp associated with the blacksmith's anvil is broken down, like a mold that encloses the object to be marked, into two parts: the handle or top stamp, the counter-stamp, called the anvil stamp, with the tail or bottom, then it is placed below, housed by passing its tail through the eye of the anvil. The blacksmith's assistant strikes with the hammer at the front on the device supported by the anvil stamp, while the blacksmith ensures the stability and quality of the assembly. A pin maker also uses a smaller stamp, that is to say a punch to shape the heads of pins. The verb fesser means "to beat strongly on a block the brass wire used to make pins".

There are many different types of mechanics ' hammers: a range of bench hammers from 100 g to 1 kg, most often classic with a rectangular head and a square flat, sometimes with a ball head, from 25 to 40 mm, flat or round riveting hammers, riveting hammers with a square striking head, hand hammers from 1 to 3 kg, hammers with a front from 3 to 8 kg, etc. The "Aux forges de Vulcain" catalog in 1909 offers, apart from these last two types of hammers, a range of a dozen riveting hammers in cast steel or chrome steel with a head length of 20 to 42 mm, i.e. a mass of 130 to 960 g, but also various riveting hammers in red copper with a head length of 28 mm.

In mechanics, the center punch is a truncated steel point on which one strikes with the hammer. In order to mark the place of a future hole in a piece of metal, the mechanic worker strikes with a hammer on the center punch, the hole is made with a punch or a drill or drill. The center punch is also a small punch for drilling thin iron. The "rivet hammer" of mechanics and locksmiths allows riveting and riveting: the old Anglo-Saxon hammer with a round head and a semi-spherical or straight point is also very practical for riveting, provided that it remains fairly light and maneuverable by the wrist. 

The martoire is a hammer with two points used by locksmiths. The locksmith's hammer has a swollen handle, and if the resistant material of the handle is fiberglass, can only weigh 300 g. In locksmithing, the lardon was an iron or steel hammer, introduced into the crevices of a piece to be forged, to make them disappear, by hot welding this piece with the mass. In locksmithing, the étampe designates a tool for riveting bolts. The moine is a sort of mass or hammer with a pointed head which allows the driving of dowels with lost heads. A pannoir is a hammer intended to flatten the heads of needles.

The sledgehammer is a wheelwright's hammer for stopping wheels. The square chase is the two-headed hammer of the same traditional craftsman for driving iron circles onto hubs. The postilion hammer with a flat, checkered peen, the riveting hammer and the lining hammer are used in bodywork ; There are also dent removal hammers with a round head and a pointed peen, as well as the light, domed coachbuilder's hammer. Similar to the postilion hammer with its flat, checkered peen, the shrinking hammer can give way to the shrinking bat.

The cutler works with a file and a hammer, he shoulders, that is to say he lowers one part and raises the other part of the blade. The tinsmith of yesteryear, a hammer worker, used the bordoir, a small anvil, to fold down the edges of sheet metal and tinplate. The tongue designated the sheet of beaten iron which received a preliminary preparation, just before being tinned and transformed into tinplate.

Let us mention the hammers for beating and removing copper from the coppersmith or coppersmith. The verb to remove means first of all "to beat with the round-headed hammer the bottom of a spherical piece of boilerwork", but also "to flatten with a hammer the bumps existing on a sheet of copper". The planing hammer with a curved handle is usually 25 to 27 cm long. Under-planing, consisting of flattening and regularizing the surface of two pieces of sheet metal or copper assembled at right angles, is a boilermaking job carried out with a hammer. The planing worker cleans his hammer on a cylindrical piece of wood, called a planing stick. Planing machines which level and fold metals have taken the place of planing workers. The paillon refers to the very thin beaten copper sheet.

To "beat a piece of tin" means to beat it on the anvil.

The pifre is the gold beater's large hammer. Gold beating is the flattening of gold with a hammer, which is then transformed into ultra-thin sheets. Beaten gold is essentially gold reduced to thin sheets for gilding. An old terminology characterizes this ancient craft: rounding refers to the flattening of a gold ingot with a hammer. The verb chasser means "to start spreading the sheets with the hammer. The verb fermer means "to continue spreading the gold sheets under the hammer". The hand denotes a series of 24 successive hammer blows struck on the metal sheet. The verb gironner corresponds to "to work with a hammer a piece of goldwork that one wants to round off". 

The maniage is the operation of sliding the gold sheets to be beaten over each other to prevent them from sticking together. The emplure is the quarter of parchment placed by the gold beater on the sheets to be beaten. The sheath is a bag made of superimposed parchment sheets in which the gold beater encloses the metal sheets to be beaten. The verb enfourrer means to arrange the vellum sheets in their sheaths to beat them. The drapeau is a small piece of cloth in which the gold beater passes the beaten sheets. The quarter is the piece of rolled metal that the gold beater subjects to the action of the hammer. The verb achever means "to finish spreading the gold under the hammer".

There is a wide range of small goldsmith-jeweler hammers for striking and pressing metal without breaking it. The goldsmith even has a special tool, the bouge, which he uses to work the parts that the hammer cannot reach,. The chiseling hammer is a variant. There are parts that the chiseler's hammer cannot reach, the latter operator uses a chisel, called a planer, to flatten them. For hollow pieces, the verb écolleter means "to widen the upper edge of the piece on the bigorne, with a hammer, to give it the desired shape". The fillet is the line of beaten gold or silver, once unwound but without winding on the silk.

Other Arts and Crafts

The quarrymen used the mail or the mallet, a large iron hammer to drive wedges into the rock, the batterand with a similar function, the têtu, a large square hammer with a toothed peen, used to knock down the stone and detach it from its bed, the picot or hammer-pick of the Anglo-Saxons, a pointed hammer with which stones are lifted, various long-handled sledgehammers and other cast steel wood wedges, etc.; The masses forming the steel head are diverse : massive with two flat heads from 3 to 12 kg, square so-called couple masses from 4 to 12 kg, so-called cutting masses with a more elongated shape from 3 to 12 kg, so-called faceted with notches in the head from 3 to 6 kg, so-called cutting masses with a sharp point and a flat or domed head, from 3 to 10 kg, or even finer curved with two hands with one flat head and the other slightly domed from 2.5 to 5.4 kg, curved with one hand and two flat heads from 2 to 3.5 kg, or from 40 to 55 cm head height.

The chipping hammer is specific to the cutting of abrasive stone. There are different types of miners' hammers, sometimes both hammers and pickaxes.

The mallet is a sculptor's hammer for roughing out cut stone or marble. The sculptor then handles various chisels, burins or chisels, striking them hard with a hammer or more gently with a mallet. The sculptor's mallet could be round in boxwood or babbitt during the Belle Époque, but also square in lead, here having a shape close to that of a hammer.

For glassmakers, the "bottle" meant an iron hammer, with which he struck a shape, in contact with the red-hot material, to drive in the bottom of the bottle. In the shipyards of yesteryear, we find the different hammers of the carpenter (marine) and the blacksmith. The caulker or worker in charge of caulking had a specific light hammer.

The carpenter's hammer is significantly heavier than the packer 's hammer. The latter, most often made of chrome-plated steel, with its polished round head, weighs around 600 g. The claw hammer, another packer's tool, has a head 20 to 42 mm long. Unpacking hammers, such as simple carpenter's hammers or bourgeois hammers with claws and keyed handles, had variable head heights, from 14 to 42 mm every 2 mm. Keyed handle hammers, hammers with characteristic stylized heads, small from 25 to 28 mm, medium around 32 mm, and large around 38 to 40 mm, were intended for opening crates of oranges or other citrus fruits. 

In the "Aux forges de Vulcain" catalogue there are hammer-knives for unpacking crates of early fruits and vegetables, and for unpacking dried fruit, light hammers with a round striking head and curved crowbar, either simple models with a head height of 14, 16, 18 up to 32 mm or a knife model with a marked notch, with more compact shapes, from 8, 10, 12 up to 25 mm. A hammer could also strike a straight unpacking chisel or a crowbar and head, objects to be struck from 30 to 40 cm, in order to unpack the goods.

The charcoal burner's hammer allows him to check the quality of his charcoal production and to reduce its size by striking the support plates. The electrician 's hammer with antistatic handle coating and fairly light, often 200 to 300 g, is recognizable by its characteristic appearance with a long, tapered head, or a thin head and tip.

The tiller with a sharp face is a cooper's hammer, the paroir with a sharp point also for trimming the inside of barrels. The chasse designates a wide range of tools of various sizes, sometimes without handle, based on a wedge or iron bar up to specific hammers, used for driving in or pushing back. The chasse à œil is a kind of hammer on which the cooper strikes with an ordinary hammer. The chasing ass has a double head, that with its wide cutting point of a cutting tool and that elongated of a hammer. The mallet is a particular variety of wooden mallet used by hoop makers and coopers. The expression "rebatter a barrel" is equivalent to tightening the staves by hitting the hoops with a mallet to drive them out towards the bung. The cooper also used specific riveting hammers, comprising a sequenced series of head diameters, for example from 8, 10, 12 up to 20 mm.

Let us mention the leather beating hammer or shoemaker 's hammer. This craftsman also used a nail hammer, like the cobbler.

The jockey is a piece of hard wood in the shape of a parallelepiped, on which the typographer strikes with the hammer to level the characters of a form. In other words, he taps, since the verb taquer means "to equalize the level of a form with the jockey". The verb deslacrer in typography is equivalent to removing the corners tightening a printing form using the hammer, then the decogner and the key.

The bookbinder commonly used a "beating hammer", the convexity of which is called a body. The battering refers to the binding operation consisting of beating the sheets of a volume, gathered in "beats", on the "beating stone" with a hammer of a particular shape in order to reduce their thickness. The "beating stones", thirty inches high, have a square surface fifteen to twenty inches on each side, very horizontal with fine grains, most often made of liais stone with a very smooth surface which is preferred to marble. This "book beater" hammer has an iron mass whose sharp edges have been rounded so as not to cut the sheets, forming a wide and square head about four inches on each side. The surface of the striking head is slightly convex, a book beater wants to "give or keep some body" to his hammer. The handle is short and thick, high enough so that the drummer's fingers can never touch the stone, which would cause some injuries detrimental to his activity, requiring skill more than strength. The hammer with the handle weighs nine to eleven pounds.

Let us also mention the harpsichord tuner's hammer or, more commonly, the piano tuner's hammer. Let us recall that the aesthetic transition from the harpsichord to the piano forte at the end of the 18th century corresponds to an instrumental technical mutation, from a device of small pliers called beaks to that of small felt-headed hammers which strike. The sound of the harpsichord comes essentially from the plucking of the string by a beak placed under it. Each key on the piano keyboard controls a small actuator hammer, which replaced the jack or thin wooden tongue acting on the vibrating strings of the harpsichords. The longuet designates a piano maker's hammer, it made it possible to drive the iron pins into the table, to which the vibrating metal strings are attached.

Other activities or professions

The hammer remains a technical training tool, as evidenced by the 1 kg commercial engineer's hammer, with its multi-purpose function. During the interwar period, vocational schools still taught the basics of hammering and forging, with the apprentice or student making their own hammer. However, the blacksmith's trade was only acquired through a long apprenticeship with experienced iron craftsmen, as Jean Prouvé recalls at the beginning of his memoirs recounting his traditional training and his first installation as an artistic ironworker in Nancy.

Law or Medicine or Performing Arts

In addition to the reflex hammer or percussion hammer typical of body auscultation, medicine can use hammers in surgery and especially during autopsies. The autopsy hammer is used to open the skull, spine, chest and abdomen. It is sometimes used in association with a wedge knife for opening the skull, with a truncated knife for rachitoma and opening the spine. A large number of small hammers have disappeared with the technological advancement, thus the percutor in lithotripsy developed by the doctor Baron Heurteloup, replaced by the application of ultrasound and other treatments, has joined the museum of medicine.

The machinist 's hammer can be of classic construction, but also place plastic tips at the head for striking, while keeping a steel handle. Light musician's hammer for percussion instrument (rod, resonator tube)

Recall the auctioneer 's or judge 's hammer, known as the chairman's hammer.

Maintenance, transport and roads

Boiler maintenance or the upkeep of various installations require the supervisor or operator to use a simple hammer. The expression "to pick a boiler" means to detach the scale adhering to the walls using a pointed hammer. In the Forges de Vulcain catalog, in 1909, the boiler picking hammer has a head made of superior cast steel, the height of which can be 28 mm, 30 mm, etc. up to 40 mm.

The verb émotter, used in sugar factories or refineries, means "to break up the agglomerated blocks of sugar with a hammer or wooden mallet".

The pickaxe is used to detach the salt encrusting marine boilers.

The road workers of bridges and roads, or of municipal or departmental services during the Belle Époque, used so-called road workers' mallets, small cast steel mallets with one or two striking heads, weighing 500 g to 1500 g. The shape of the double head is similar to the quarryman's cutting mallet, a heavier tool of 3 to 12 kg. Various stone cutter's tools were used for paving, breaking stones and stoning roads. The batterand or commonly battrand, with a flexible handle, was an iron mallet for efficiently breaking stones and pebbles. The boucharde, a hammer with a head cut into diamond points, used by stone cutters to finish cutting hard stones rough-hewn with a chisel, is essential for renovating or changing stone surfaces,. A sidewalk edge could be bush-hammered in this way, just like a signpost base.

The road services use different equipment: First, the two-headed hollow sledgehammers, from 1 to 10 kg, associated with the double panard hammers with bevelled edge or panard cleavers, from 2 to 12 kg, as regards their metal heads in cast steel, constitute the paver's sledgehammer tools >. In addition to the slab or paver's hammer, to lay the paving, the art of paving uses the sledgehammer, a large short hammer with a blunt bevel, to split the paving stones and shape the facings, hence the sledgehammer, a term which designates a fragment detached from a stone or a paving stone by this tool or the expression "sledgehammer the paving stone", that is to say to cut it by this means. Today 's hammers, sometimes made of one-piece materials, are considerably lighter and weigh only 2 to 1.5 kg. In the Belle Époque, paving hammers weighed an average of 6 kg, as did hammers for sewer covers. The sewer hammer, now versatile and lightweight, can be used to lift manhole covers. The long, smooth head, weighing around 350 g, often weighs more than the entire assembly, which weighs around 600 g.

Sports, exploration, geology and mineralogy

The common field tools of the geologist and the mineralogist are the distant heirs of those of the researchers of mineralized veins or mining prospectors.

The geologist's hammer has a head height, made of hardened or cast steel, between 24 and 34 mm. The Parisian catalog, at the Vulcain forges, in 1909, presents it hafted, in superior cast steel, with a black color or a polished appearance. The tip twice as long as the striking head allows the sample to be released on the collection ground. Hinged pick hammers ensuring protection of the handle near the limited striking head or fossil pick hammers have a long and flared pick tip. The robust Estwing hammer is today known by geologists around the world. Mineralogist's hammers, either pointed, edged, or with both, are of more classic construction, with a head height of 20 to 40 mm, black or polished. Mineralogists' mallets, more compact at the head, have a more modest head height, from 16 to 30 mm. Hammers and mallets can strike in the field or in the laboratory, on cold chisels, designed to detach both the surroundings and the sample. Phonolites are rocks easily identifiable under the hammer: they are easily cut into lamellae and ring under the blows of the hammer.

The climbing hammer or ice axe hammer is available depending on the surfaces to be climbed: snow, ice, hard or crumbly rock structures

Similar tools

Today, a sledgehammer refers to various types of large hammers used for percussion by hewers or lumberjacks. A pickaxe or ice axe does not fall into the hammer category, although there are hybrid forms associated with various activities.

The mallet is generally considered a more or less light hammer. Although it is not strictly speaking a hammer that normally has a metal head, as it was originally made entirely of wood, it has the same shape and function. The head is now made of materials such as wood or rubber, or even brass, a metal that is quite easily deformed, or various plastic materials. A wooden mallet with a square or cylindrical head, with an edge or radius of 12 to 5 cm, can provide effective percussion, even with its short handle. Rubber mallets, with white and black handles, or colored ones, sometimes called "non-rebound" can weigh more than 450 g, which is often heavier than a small, light hammer with a steel head and a wooden handle.

The beater, by its function only and not by its shape, is, strictly speaking, comparable to a light hammer whose point used for percussion is flat or grooved. It is used in bodywork for planing (finishing straightening) of parts. The rebatoir is a beater for treading and re-beating bricks and earth tiles.

A ram is a mass of iron, cast iron, or iron-reinforced wood, most often acting by its weight, used to drive and beat piles. The pisoir or pison is a long-handled hardwood mass used to beat and compress the earth in the formwork to make it more compact before making rammed earth. The rebatoir is a bat for trampling and re-beating bricks and earth tiles.

Physics

For the most efficient transfer of momentum and energy, it is best to select the hammer mass appropriate for the part to be driven—such as a nail, punch, chisel, or chisel. Using a short, stiff wire (rope), chain, or pull bar, the hammer swing can also be converted into pulling force, for pulling out tent pegs or pulling together prefabricated parquet floorboards.

In order to work material directly, to smooth it, to deform it (e.g. by hammering and forging), or to destructively separate or crush it, a suitable head shape is required, from quite flat to spherical to pointed. Hammer heads can be made from many different materials, such as hardened steel, titanium, but also from relatively soft copper, plastic (e.g. rubber) or wood. A groove with a bay and magnet on the top side of the hammer head can be used to hold an iron nail for the first blow, thus allowing one-handed nailing over the head. A conical slot allows a nail with a head to be pulled out using the hammer as a lever.

Striking technique: To reduce the impact on the wrist during a strike, hold the hammer at the center of impact, as no forces are exerted in the hand at this point. The exact position of the center of impact can be felt over the course of several hammer blows. 

As a force amplifier

A hammer is a simple force amplifier that works by converting mechanical work into kinetic energy and back.

In the swing that precedes each blow, the hammer head stores a certain amount of kinetic energy—equal to the length D of the swing times the force f produced by the muscles of the arm and by gravity. When the hammer strikes, the head is stopped by an opposite force coming from the target, equal and opposite to the force applied by the head to the target. If the target is a hard and heavy object, or if it is resting on some sort of anvil, the head can travel only a very short distance d before stopping. Since the stopping force F times that distance must be equal to the head's kinetic energy, it follows that F is much greater than the original driving force f—roughly, by a factor D/d. In this way, great strength is not needed to produce a force strong enough to bend steel, or crack the hardest stone.

Effect of the head's mass

The amount of energy delivered to the target by the hammer-blow is equivalent to one half the mass of the head times the square of the head's speed at the time of impact. While the energy delivered to the target increases linearly with mass, it increases quadratically with the speed (see the effect of the handle, below). High tech titanium heads are lighter and allow for longer handles, thus increasing velocity and delivering the same energy with less arm fatigue than that of a heavier steel head hammer. A titanium head has about 3% recoil energy and can result in greater efficiency and less fatigue when compared to a steel head with up to 30% recoil. Dead blow hammers use special rubber or steel shot to absorb recoil energy, rather than bouncing the hammer head after impact.

Effect of the handle

The handle of the hammer helps in several ways. It keeps the user's hands away from the point of impact. It provides a broad area that is better-suited for gripping by the hand. Most importantly, it allows the user to maximize the speed of the head on each blow. The primary constraint on additional handle length is the lack of space to swing the hammer. This is why sledgehammers, largely used in open spaces, can have handles that are much longer than a standard carpenter's hammer. The second most important constraint is more subtle. Even without considering the effects of fatigue, the longer the handle, the harder it is to guide the head of the hammer to its target at full speed.

Most designs are a compromise between practicality and energy efficiency. With too long a handle, the hammer is inefficient because it delivers force to the wrong place, off-target. With too short a handle, the hammer is inefficient because it does not deliver enough force, requiring more blows to complete a given task. Modifications have also been made with respect to the effect of the hammer on the user. Handles made of shock-absorbing materials or varying angles attempt to make it easier for the user to continue to wield this age-old device, even as nail guns and other powered drivers encroach on its traditional field of use.

As hammers must be used in many circumstances, where the position of the person using them cannot be taken for granted, trade-offs are made for the sake of practicality. In areas where one has plenty of room, a long handle with a heavy head (like a sledgehammer) can deliver the maximum amount of energy to the target. It is not practical to use such a large hammer for all tasks, however, and thus the overall design has been modified repeatedly to achieve the optimum utility in a wide variety of situations.

Effect of gravity

Gravity exerts a force on the hammer head. If hammering downwards, gravity increases the acceleration during the hammer stroke and increases the energy delivered with each blow. If hammering upwards, gravity reduces the acceleration during the hammer stroke and therefore reduces the energy delivered with each blow. Some hammering methods, such as traditional mechanical pile drivers, rely entirely on gravity for acceleration on the down stroke.

Ergonomics and injury risks

A hammer may cause significant injury if it strikes the body. Both manual and powered hammers can cause peripheral neuropathy or a variety of other ailments when used improperly. Awkward handles can cause repetitive stress injury (RSI) to hand and arm joints, and uncontrolled shock waves from repeated impacts can injure nerves and the skeleton. Additionally, striking metal objects with a hammer may produce small metallic projectiles which can become lodged in the eye. It is therefore recommended to wear safety glasses.

War hammers

A war hammer is a late medieval weapon of war intended for close combat action.

Symbolism

The hammer, being one of the most used tools by man, has been used very much in symbols such as flags and heraldry. In the Middle Ages, it was used often in blacksmith guild logos, as well as in many family symbols. The hammer and pick are used as a symbol of mining.

In mythology, the gods Thor (Norse) and Sucellus (Celtic and Gallo-Roman), and the hero Hercules (Greek), all had hammers that appear in their lore and carried different meanings. Thor, the god of thunder and lightning, wields a hammer named Mjölnir. Many artifacts of decorative hammers have been found, leading modern practitioners of this religion to often wear reproductions as a sign of their faith.

In American folklore, the hammer of John Henry represents the strength and endurance of a man.

A political party in Singapore, Workers' Party of Singapore, based their logo on a hammer to symbolize the party's civic nationalism and social democracy ideology.

A variant, well-known symbol with a hammer in it is the hammer and sickle, which was the symbol of the former Soviet Union and is strongly linked to communism and early socialism. The hammer in this symbol represents the industrial working class (and the sickle represents the agricultural working class). The hammer is used in some coats of arms in former socialist countries like East Germany. Similarly, the Hammer and Sword symbolizes Strasserism, a strand of Nazism seeking to appeal to the working class. Another variant of the symbol was used for the North Korean party, Workers' Party of Korea, incorporated with an ink brush on the middle, which symbolizes both Juche and Songun ideologies.

In Pink Floyd – The Wall, two hammers crossed are used as a symbol for the fascist takeover of the concert during "In the Flesh". This also has the meaning of the hammer beating down any "nails" that stick out.

The gavel, a small wooden mallet, is used to symbolize a mandate to preside over a meeting or judicial proceeding, and a graphic image of one is used as a symbol of legislative or judicial decision-making authority.

Judah Maccabee was nicknamed "The Hammer", possibly in recognition of his ferocity in battle. The name "Maccabee" may derive from the Aramaic maqqaba. (see Judah Maccabee § Origin of Name "The Hammer".)

The hammer in the song "If I Had a Hammer" represents a relentless message of justice broadcast across the land. The song became a symbol of the civil rights movement.

Arts and literature, music and mystical religion

The hammer is omnipresent in the world of craftsmanship, which has an impact on the most diverse cultural, artistic and religious conceptions.

Rumi, a poet and Sufi master of Persian origin, is the inventor in Konya of rituals of religious meditation and sacred music, songs and dances associated today with the way of life of the brotherhoods of whirling dervishes. Strolling through the merchant quarter of his adopted city, the mystical poet, sad and grieving over the disappearance of his masters, at the end of the 1240s, stopped to listen attentively to the shrill and rhythmic hammering of the goldsmith and, according to legend, entered into ecstasy. This latter craftsman, diligent at his workbench, shaping and chiseling a delicate work of gold with a small hammer, would be, without knowing it, at the origin of spiritual listening or sāmà taught by the Sufi master.

Popular song has not failed to illustrate the hammer. A variation on the tune of the coopers' song from Le Joyeux Charpentier, composed by Oscar Tricot, offers a refrain better suited to urban crafts: "Hit hit hammer / and always in the shop / it makes a racket, it's the custom / to attract practice".

According to Genesis, Tubalcain, son of Lamech, was the first to hammer metals diligently and make all sorts of objects out of iron and bronze with a hammer. Sanctus Eligius, alias Eloi, a minister and lawyer sporting his hammer, became the patron saint of goldsmiths and beaters of gold, silver, iron, etc. in the Western Christian world. Saint Otto the bishop has the same attribute. The mace or club of Saint James the Minor, Saint Adalbert, or Saint Timothy maintain ambivalent functions: a fulling staff for the former, a blow causing the death of the latter. In the phantasmagoria of Christian history, inspired by the furnaces of the Apocalypse, Attila is the hammer that strikes the world.

Folklore has drawn from medieval hagiography a host of rituals of concession or sacred attribution of a place of spiritual rest, with chapel, monastery or church, by the random throwing of the mason's hammer or the carpenter's axe. The rivalry between Saint Léger and Saint Lairy forces the latter to reject his tool to build elsewhere, at the new point of fall. Saint George takes the place of Saint Eloi by the same ritual. Saint Hervé, forced by the opposition of Saint Pierre and the church already established at Plounevez, must throw hammers and paraphernalia elsewhere. Often it is a simple choice decided by the concrete landing place, thus Saint Bozon chooses the location of his future church of Bouzemont or Saint Rigaud Cluny. The hammer, in a more unusual way, can ensure the production, by repeated blows on a sacred support, of persistent wind: thus on the Roch-en-And dolmen, considered as a "ship of the dead", at Saint-Pierre -de -Quiberon the blows could make the land winds or the sea winds blow by white magic, according to the prayer.

The seven arts were commonly represented on the decorated facades of Gothic buildings: Music, which appears on the portal of Laon Cathedral with hammer in hand, is a female creature who seems to be listening to the sounds of five bells hanging from the same support. On the facade of Chartres Cathedral, the seated woman representing Music holds an eight-stringed harp, a viol and three small bells on which she is preparing to strike with a hammer. Let us not forget the art of carillonnage, which was originally practiced with a hammer and bells accessible and close to a large carillonneur, before using complex hammer devices, easily touching sometimes distant bells or small bells. The clock of Cambrai offers an animation of the time by the automatons Martin and Martine, leaving the belfry, each by an opposite door, one minute before the hour and armed with hammers. Martine, active at the level of the hourly subdivisions, strikes the quarters and half hours on a small resonant bell. Martin, most often at rest, strikes the hour on the large bell. The belfry of Douai also reveals the ancient correspondences between the Gayant family or the giants of the secular urban festival, capable of striking with hammers, and the common clock and its jacquemarts, the bells and the art of the carillon. In many modern or contemporary paintings considered mysterious, many figures carry a hammer and display no apparent profession: they seem to represent the blows or irremediable advances of time.

The corporation of German poet-craftsmen, known as the Meistersänger, proposed to assert themselves through a male expression or voice, powerful and frank, brutal and joyful, with verses rhythmic to the cadence of hammers on the anvil. Their art differed notably from the first mystical Minnesänger, which valued nuances and self-effacement in composition. René Char in his opus " Le Marteau sans maître " seems to tell us that poetry must be hammered out, like the syllables that compose it, with power and insistence, and open up a free path for us, specific to each of us, to escape from any influence or subjection. Pierre Boulez, an admirer of the Javanese gamelan orchestra, perceived a correspondence there adapted to musical creation.

Eastern Christians have preserved the ancient and sonorous agiosymantes and hagiosideres/agiosimérides, struck vigorously by hammers, to summon or call the faithful to prayer, to Sunday mass, since the bells were long banned by their Ottoman military masters, following the Muslim Seljuk Turks who perceived them as calls to revolt. The former, as an old sacred signal, are long pieces of maple wood, the latter are iron blades suspended from a tree or iron plates suspended at the entrance of Greek Orthodox churches.

Boileau, like the academician Furetière with his delicate ear, seems to hate the febvres and their odious hammering noises. He exclaims:

A horrible locksmith, laborious Vulcan / with a cursed iron, which he prepares with great noise / with a hundred hammer blows is going to split my head.

He attacks his prolific rival in versification, Jean Chapelain, by comparing him to a rough blacksmith wielding pliers and hammer, a vile craftsman whose work is far removed from the apotheoses of celestial inspiration :

Cursed be the harsh author, whose harsh and rough verve / his gripping brain, rhymes in spite of Minerva / and, with his heavy hammer hammering common sense, / has made wicked verses twelve times twelve hundred.

A burning conscience testifying to his time, Victor Hugo, in his novel " The Last Day of a Condemned Man " described the placing of collars at Bicêtre, inaugurating the entry of condemned prisoners into the penal colony: "The blacksmiths of the jail armed with portable anvils rivet the irons cold with great blows of iron sledgehammers". George Sand mocks in her own way the deference of the rough southern blacksmiths towards the fragile female sex, by writing her sentence "The noise of the hammers irritates my nerves, as if I were a young lady".

Jacques Arago described the "baptism of the Tropics" of sailors and other long-distance travellers, a noisy parody of the induction of novices of this latitude, the carronades under the rapid blows of hammers or, failing that, the sheets of metal on merchant ships, announcing a masquerade,.

The aphorism of the writer Milan Kundera sums up a thought on the tool, but also the concrete or mental tooling with human means: " A worker can be the master of the hammer, but the hammer dictates its law."

Sourced from Wikipedia