dear mr allen wrench,

I am such a huge fan of your work. I’ve put together no fewer than a dozen pieces of furniture with your help, and I’ve learned the intricacies of jiggling, shaking, and angling that make you sing. I have a drawer that slowly fills with different versions of you, sure to cause great confusion at any point in time I have to take something apart. 

I wanted to take a moment to share my appreciation & also learn more about you. 

In my searches, I learned you were patented by W.G. Allen in 1909 – for recessed hex-driven safety screws, a safety improvement over other fasteners which stuck out of objects. A side note – the illustration style in the early 1900s is one of my favorites – very similar to a reference book on joinery my dad & I have studied in our woodworking projects. 

Allen’s company would become synonymous (like a Q-tip or a Band-aid) with the wrench required by his watery screws. And rather hilariously, as everything seems to come back to venture in some days, Bain Capital purchased Apex Tool Group in 2013, which had acquired Allen’s company previously. They shut down the brand as the name was too ubiquitous in 2017. 

In 1947, the International Organization for Standardization was formed, and one of its first tasks was setting a standard size for screws. Beyond standardization, IKEA in particular, seeded the main stream adoption of the Allen wrench in the 1960s. Journalist Lauren Collins, in the New Yorker, said “The Allen wrench is the egg to IKEA’s instant cake mix.” 

I have a bone to pick with the IKEA-zation of Airbnbs world wide, but that’s a topic for another day. Global functional minimalism is at once totally understandable in late stage capitalism and infuriating upon encountering a house that looks the same in four different countries. For further reading on Ikea, I’m really enjoying Lauren Collin’s piece – one of my favorite excerpts below: 

“Alan Penn, a professor of architectural and urban computing at University College London, conducted a study of the ikea labyrinth and deemed it sadomasochistic. The only comparably vast shopping environment he could think of, he told the London Times, was the Bazaar of Isfahan, a seventeenth-century Persian marketplace.”

“Kamprad [Ikea’s CEO] drives a beat-up Volvo. He is reported to recycle tea bags. He is known to pocket the salt and pepper packets at restaurants. He has ranked as high as fifth on Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people.”

Anyway, back to you my trusty Allen wrench friend. 

At seven or eight, I discovered immense pleasure in moving all the furniture in my bedroom around whenever I was stressed. Now, moving furniture around doesn’t hold a candle to ordering the exact dimensioned 4.5 to 5 star reviewed piece of furniture, receiving it in a box to my doorstep, interpreting universal directions with no words, and spending quality time with you, Mr Allen Wrench. 

The Allen wrench, to me, represents the freedom of being able to control your surroundings, to create something from nothing. To be able to stand back in traditional dad-form, one arm on hip, other up the doorframe, gazing in satisfaction at a piece of furniture that was not two hours before in a cardboard box. 

So thank you very much for being the key to my grown-up Legos, 

Paige 

ps – Can you please start marking what size you or the hex bolts are somewhere on yourself? I am quite tired of trying to figure out which Allen wrench is which and going to the hardware store to buy 12 of you and then discovering it is not metric vs imperial. That’s not very standard of you.