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A Closer Look at Kelsey’s Nuts
When we were kids, we watched a lot of Westerns on TV and at the movies
Cowboys and Indians (and that’s what hostile savages were called then), bad guys and the Sheriff’s posse, the grizzled old prospector and the virginal schoolmarm. In cowboy movies, we could always count on a stagecoach being chased by masked bandits who were after the strongbox or Indians looking to steal horses and take scalps.
As children, we were amazed by the stagecoach’s backward-spinning wheels
The wagon-wheel effect is directly related to not only the limits of human visual perception, but also to the speed of the film used to shoot the scene. Wheels may appear to spin backward, forward, or not turn at all.
The best wheels are the roundest wheels because they roll true
The best wagon wheels were made of seasoned hickory, more durable and more expensive than oak or ash. They were built in pieces and assembled by hand. Everything had to fit closely together to maintain the integrity of the wheel. Poorly-constructed wheels would wobble and ultimately break, stranding the stagecoach out on the prairie with no spare in the trunk.
A wheelwright is a skilled carpenter and a skilled blacksmith, too
The best wooden-spoked wagon wheels were made by master craftsmen who built their products to exacting specifications. That meant the tolerances between the assembled pieces were close, what you and I might call a snug fit. The better the fit, the better the ride, putting less strain on the stagecoach, the horses, and the passengers inside.
The hubs at the centers of those spoked wheels slipped onto the axles like rings on fingers
The wheels were held in place by locking pins, called linchpins, that were inserted in holes drilled all the way through the axle. As wheel technology evolved, wooden wheel hubs were were replaced by cast iron hubs and the linchpins were replaced with threaded metal hubs.
John Kelsey was born in Detroit in 1867
He bought, sold, and operated several businesses.* The United States Chemico-Wood Company was one of his early ventures. Its products included spoked wooden wheels and wooden toilet seats, which I always associated with gas station toilets – along with rust-stained sinks, broken mirrors, and toilet paper that had somehow been shellacked.
Kelsey became famous for his wooden automotive wheels
His road to success was paved by Henry Ford, who asked him to supply the wheels for his Model T’s. At the time, wooden wheels were sophisticated state-of-the-art technology, and Kelsey’s wheels were the best money could buy.
During the first World War, Kelsey switched over to manufacturing wooden wheels for military wagons and cannon carriages
One hundred years later, many of Kelsey’s wooden wheels are still in reasonably good condition and show up at antique car shows and swap meets.
The linchpin was gone with the wooden-hubbed wagon wheel
Automotive wheels used threaded nuts that securely attached the wheels to the vehicle. Kelsey’s auto wheel nuts were of even higher quality than the ones made for wagons. They were constructed so precisely and to such close tolerances that Kelsey’s nuts earned a reputation for wheels that didn’t wobble because they tracked straight and true.
“Tighter than Kelsey’s nuts” came to mean any really well-made mechanical thing.
What are dead naughts?
When paired with naughts, dead has nothing to do with the deceased. Dead stood for dead-on, which means precisely accurate and to the point (it’s spot-on’s American cousin). Dead is absolutely and completely. Naught is the numeral zero.
Just as artists signed their work, so did early machinists
When every piece of the item they had assembled was lined up just right and functioning perfectly, machinists used a metal punch to make small but visible side-by-side dents somewhere on the product. Those two round dimples indicated their machine work was 00 – dead naughts.
Naughts got tangled up with nuts (another Kelsey product), a vulgarism for testicles
Testicles are more or less round (oval-ish?) and most men have two. Testicles rest side-by-side inside a tote bag, known to doctors as a scrotum. 00.
Before the days of Ace, Home Depot, and Lowe’s, nails were sold loose and in bulk
Customers were charged by the pound, not by a prepackaged number of nails, as they are today. Hardware clerks scooped up loose nails from a bin and placed them on a spring scale. When the indicator stopped moving, the pointer aligned with the desired weight, and customers got a fair measure – to within half an ounce or so.
Loose nails don’t need to be measured exactly
But science, technology, engineering, and medicine all have things that do. The STEMs need very precise measurements down to the gram, the milligram (there are 28,349.52 of them per ounce), and beyond.
When even more precision is demanded, substances are measured in grains and nanometers
The atomic clock measures time with a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 Kelvin. The natural oscillating motion of atoms acts like the pendulum in your grandmother’s grandfather clock – without the relentless tick-tocking.
Here are some of the things I found while cyberwandering down side roads leading to who knows where:
- “Deader than Kelsey’s nuts” has nothing to do with the deceased or plants growing underground. It means dead-on, spot-on, and right-on, right-on, right-on.YM
- I came across a forum where several people were sharing their profound wisdom in a discussion on the origin of **Kelso’s <sic> nuts.
- “Ha, not even Google can answer the origin of dead as ***Chelsea’s <sic> nuts.”
- “Kelsey’s nuts is an old Southern idiom that identifies empty places, people who are wound up, and anywhere the word tight shows up.”
- “It’s an 1800s reference to discomfort experienced by condom users of the day.”
- “Kelsey made high-quality wheels for Henry Ford’s Model T autos. His lug nuts were tighter than Dick’s hatband.”
Wait a minute. Kelsey’s nuts were tighter than Dick’s hatband?
As I understand it, the term tighter than Dick’s hatband means as tight with money as Scrooge McDuck. But who who the hell is Dick? I gave the assignment to a robot and watched as it searched its library for several seconds before delivering this a.i. gem:
The idea is that a hatband (the band around a hat) would be tightly-fitted to ensure the hat stays in place.”
Pompous and empty online bloviators don’t agree, but most credentialed historians tell us that Dick was Richard Cromwell
Richard was the son of the notorious Oliver Cromwell and inherited the throne when daddy died. Dick was so unfit that the rest of the royals took his crown (the hatband) away because it was figuratively too ‘tight,’ and threw him out of the castle after only eight months on the job.
There’s also queer as Dick’s hatband
Modern times, tsk, tsk. Nanny software doesn’t want me to say queer because the Young Moderns who programmed it don’t know the original sense of the word I’ve used here. For most of its existence, the word queer meant having some trait to an extreme, extraordinary, or peculiar level.
Queer as Dick’s hatband meant absurdly so
It first appeared in the 1796 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
Queer didn’t take on the meaning of homosexual until a hundred years later
Dr Justin Bengry, director of The University of London’s Goldsmiths’ Centre for Queer History, says the first recorded use of “queer” as a label for homosexuals came during Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial and imprisonment for gross indecency.
Which is deader – Kelsey’s nuts or a doornail?
Deader than a doornail had been in use for hundreds of years before Kelsey made his first nuts.
When a nail goes all the way through a piece of wood, the sharp point is exposed
To prevent injury and to keep the nails from being removed and reused, carpenters hammered the nail heads flush with the surface and then pounded the sharp points and the exposed part of the shaft down into the wood. Yes, bent nails can be removed with effort, but they can’t be reused because they don’t unbend into straight nails. They’re ‘dead.’
Why a doornail?
Dead as a doornail pleases the ear. Dead as a ten-penny nail doesn’t.
Young Moderns’ Roundup
Right-on, right-on, right-on is courtesy James Brown.
The word queer first meant odd, just as the word gay first meant cheerfully light-hearted. In those quaint days of yesteryear, making love meant flirting.
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*Kelsey Hickory Company; Kelsey Wheel Company; Kelsey-Hayes; Kelsey-Herbert; McClure, Kelsey & Co; et al. Rather than drag you through all the companies Kelsey had a hand in, I’ve left it at Kelsey. I should add Kelsey-Hayes is still known for making high quality automobile wheels. Kelsey’s most famous wire wheels with knockoff hubs are shown below on a magnificently restored 1954 Buick Skylark.
**They were confidently unaware that Five-Time-Horse of the Year Kelso was one of history’s greatest gelded racehorses.
***My top-of-mind Chelseas are the Premier League Chelsea Football Club Blues and the only child of Bill and Hillary. Who and/or what are yours?
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