LISTEN: Screw Thread Solves 173-Year-Old Mystery

When London's Crystal Palace was constructed in 1851, it was the world's largest building. However, the project's greatest mystery was how the structure was completed in just 190 days. A new study from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, published in The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology, has discovered that the Crystal Palace was the first building known to use a standard screw thread.The Crystal Palace is the earliest known building to use Whitworth screw threads, later known as British Standard Whitworth (BSW), the first national screw thread standard in the world.