It started last year with a call from a New York Times editor with his eye on the millennium. Would Witold Rybczynski care to pen an essay celebrating the Best Tool of the last 1,000 years? If Rybczynski was at first a little reluctant – why couldn’t he essay Best Architect or Best City? – the former Montreal architect, who now teaches urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, soon warmed to his subject. But which tool was Best? Sifting the contents of his box of hand tools, he considered the handsaw, the tape measure, the carpenter’s brace. Necessary all, but somehow none was quite momentous enough. Likewise the screwdriver, which got Rybczynski’s wife’s vote, but not his. At first.

The first books Rybczynski consulted told him that the screwdriver was one of the last additions to the woodworker’s arsenal. And yet the deeper he dug, the more evidence he discovered suggesting that this wasn’t so. Leading the way back all the way to Archimedes, “the Father of the Screw,” Rybczynski visits with Diderot and Dürer; offers a potted history of buttons; explores the rise of the arquebus; and tells the story of a mostly unheralded screwdriver hero, the Canadian inventor Peter Robertson.

One Good Turn looks a slender book, and it might seem all the more so lined up against the biography of Frederick Law Olmsted that foregoes it in the Rybczynski bibliography. Subtitled “America in the Nineteenth Century,” A Clearing in the Distance was Simon Schama-esque in its cultural scope, with Rybczynski using his subject as a lens through which to gaze on a nation in a crucial moment in its history.

If this book isn’t quite so ambitious, it’s an altogether charming slice of arcana, written with an elegance that won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Rybczynski’s earlier work – The Most Beautiful House in the World, say, or his inquiries into the ideas of home and the weekend. One Good Turn is a fascinating and delightfully dense mix of detective story, social study, historical anecdote, and industrial evolution that transcends the humble tool box.