Widget/Witchet
	What's in a Name?

Educator Meg Wastie with Widget and namesake For our exhibit Wintering Over, tool-collector Gene Fox loaned us a fascinating old tool identified as a widget. Wow, is there really such a thing? Well, yes and no, but more about that later. About this time, our education coordinator Meg Wastie arrived with an adorable beaver hand puppet. Our staff promptly named him Widget. Widget allegedly has a serious pedagogical purpose -- catching and holding the attention of our younger student visitors as their programs progress. However, Museum insiders report that Widget's primary purpose seems to be to amuse our education staff. They love him, and have endowed him with multiple personalities and found him favorite toys to play with. In the meantime, the widget tool joined our exhibit as an example of an implement that might have been used at home during the long winter months. Some research turned up further information on the tool. A perusal of 8 or 10 reference sources, both in the METC library and on the web, yielded the information that the tool is a type of plane called a rounder. Its purpose is to turn or taper square or octagonal wood blanks into large dowels such as tool handles. All of our sources agreed that such a tool is called a witchet, but several also listed widget as an alternative form. The term witchet may have been reserved for the more complex adjustable types of rounder planes. And widget may well have been a corruption of witchet. Such alternative terms and spellings were common in the days when craftsmen and their apprentices often had little formal education, and spelling could be a real adventure. In modern usage, a widget is "a device that is very useful for a particular job." Economists like to speak of widgets as abstract objects manufactured in factories. The tool's operation can be surmised from the photo. A sturdy wooden block with dual handles and a guide hole through the center was fitted with a cutting blade or iron fixed perpendicular to the axis of the wooden blank that was pushed through the guide as the tool rotated around it to cut the rounded form. Nowadays, such work is typically performed by a power lathe. So our tool is probably more properly called a witchet, but widget is much more fun, especially if you're a fuzzy little beaver much loved by our education staff! Tom Judd

©2005 Museum of Early Trades & Crafts