Nails are common accessories we encounter daily. We see them in various places almost every day. Surprisingly, these ordinary nails have an extraordinary history of technological development. Today, let's explore this together.

Wooden or bone dowels are the precursors to what we know as rivets. Metal deformed objects found in some archaeological discoveries in ancient Egypt may be the ancestors of the rivets we know today. The use of rivets can actually be traced back to the early use of malleable metals, such as the Egyptians using rivets during the Bronze Age to securely rivet together the six wooden sectors of the grooved wheel's outer rim. After the Greeks successfully cast large statues in bronze, they used rivets to rivet the various parts together. This is the early historical record we know of that resembles rivets.

Modern rivets actually trace their origins back to 1916. H.V. White of the British Aircraft Manufacturing Company secured a patent for a single-sided blind rivet, marking the beginning of the widespread application of rivets. The growth of the aviation industry brought a new dawn for the development of rivets.

The lightweight nature of aluminum itself, along with its high corrosion resistance, has made rivets a versatile choice from aerospace and aviation to office machinery, electronics, and sports equipment, and later to automobiles, ships, and large machinery. It can be said that this blind rivet has now become an effective and stable method of mechanical assembly. The exact time when the hollow rivet was invented, however, is not well-documented.

But the invention of the harness occurred between the 9th and 10th centuries AD. The riveted harness, much like the nailed horseshoe, freed slaves from the burdensome labor, while the rivet itself spurred many significant inventions, such as the iron tongs for copper and iron workers and the sheep shearing scissors for farmers.