There was an old thread that mades its way to the top recently and that prompted me to start this thread.
I think many will agree that the adjustable wrench has for over a century, been one of the most ubiquitous tools found in most every home. A minimum of one in a household toolbox, or maybe hung as a set of three somewhere on the garage peg board or out in the shed.
There's no doubt that the adjustable wrench is a very versatile tool that could potentially do the job that may otherwise take a set of 10 wrenches to complete. It's also very portable and lightweight: one or two adjustables in your pocket versus a whole set of wrenches in a bulky wrench roll that weighs a lot more.
Many would also baulk at the thought of using an adjustable when there's a perfectly suitable wrench size available to use on any given fastener, but when we roll back in time back to the early to mid-1800's when industries were in its infant stages, the adjustable wrench was the tool of choice.
We have metric and SAE standard fasteners today, but what about the 19th century? The answer is--there was no standard...SAE what? Metric what?
These were the days before any standards were placed on the production of fasteners. A specially made wrench for a bunch of specially made fasteners for X machinery manufactured by X company.
The 1800's, during the time when steam power evolutionized the industrial production, factories needed maintenance workers to frequently maintain their steam machines. The nature of the work required them to work off the ground, up high in the facility, and hopping from one station to another.
Some may have heard the term "monkey wrench". The origin of that term is associated with the young factory workers of those days. Kids between 15 to 20 years old, being agile and enthusiastic, were employed to do the work, often dirty, grease laden work. The tool of the trade for them was the F-type wrench (the earliest form of the adjustable wrench), not because they didn't need to carry a full set of wrenches with them, but because there was no standardization set for fasterners at the time (a set of SAE sized wrenches would've have done them much good at the time). Because these kids were working above ground, the end of the handle had a hole so that they could tie their wrenches to themselves.
Working in the steamy, greasy work environment, navigating from station to station above ground, these maintenance workers were then aptly named "grease monkeys", and their tool of the trade was tagged with the name "monkey wrench".
Although the world has united to create a standardization of fastener production for a near century, we still see tool manufacturers producing adjustable wrenches. I suppose as long as humans manufacture things that require assembly, there will always be a place for the adjustable wrench for its versatility and portability, like the grease monkeys of the past relied them for.