HAMMER, a tool for driving nails or wedges and for beating malleable materials. (See MALLET). There are hand hammers, steam hammers and electric hammers. The or dinary hammer of to-day is essentially. an American product. Exactly when the ham mer came into use is not told in history, but it is certain that some rude form of the in strument must have been used in the earliest days of handicraft. Of the hammers made in America to-day there is no end. There is the little tack hammer which weighs only a few ounces and is indispensable in house, store or factory. Then there is the 20- and 30-ton ham mer, driven by steam and used for making im mense forgings. The numberless effects which are due to its remarkable force of impact have made the hammer a necessity in all trades. Im mense manufactories, employing thousands of men, are grinding year in and year out making hammers, while 10 times as many wholesale houses are busy putting the product on the mar ket. The •industry has advanced to such a stage that many general hardware firms in the Uni ted States have thrown out the hammer, leav ing it to the houses that deal in tools exclu sively.
Hammers are made in a variety of shapes, the most in demand being the claw hammer.
This and the shoemaker's hammer have re tained their shapes for hundreds of years. One gold beating firm relies on them entirely. The sheets or leaves of gold are hammered to such exceeding thinness that 250,000 are required to make up the thickness of an inch. Another odd product of the hammer factory is the butcher's hammer, used for killing cattle. It is capable when properly wielded of carrying a very heavy blow. Then there are the stonecutter's ham mer, the carpet-layer's hammer, the wood-carv er's mallet and the plumber's odd implement. All of these have a good sale in the markets of the world, because they possess a °some which users cannot find duplicated in the output of other countries.