Antique and Vintage Pliers

Pliers (sometimes spelled plyers) can be thought of as mechanic extensions of the human hand, providing plumbers, electricians, carpenters, glazers, cobblers, jewelers, and watchmakers with a firm and precise grip on their work. As with hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, and saws, the design of pliers is as varied of the tasks they are required to perform. Thus, there are needle nose pliers whose heads taper to a point (rosary pliers users by jewelers do not even have flat sections on their heads), while the heads on pliers users by glazers are extra wide. Some pliers are built with a fixed pivot point, others have two or more, allowing the pliers to open wide with a simple push of the thumb. There are pliers designed primarily to cut rather than grip, as well as pliers that do both. And then there are pliers meant to perform only one task well, such as pliers designed to remove or install oil filters on internal-combustion engines. The forebears of these and other types of pliers go back to the first pair of wooden tongs designed to hold an object that was literally too hot to handle. Wooden tongs were followed by metal ones, allowing blacksmiths to do their work efficiently and safely. Before long, pliers used by farriers to shoe horses and care for the animals' hooves had become commonplace on farms, along with fencing pliers and scores of other specialized tools. All of which is to say that by 1857, when a German immigrant named Mathias Klein repaired a pair of pliers for a customer, pliers had long been a part of the hand-tools landscape. But the entry of Klein's Chicago company into the pliers marketplace was fortuitous, as the demand for pliers that could both grip and cut soared among a new cohort of telegraph linemen, for whom the lineman's pliers were named. By the beginning of the 20th century, Klein was manufacturing more than 100 different models and sizes of pliers, each finely calibrated to a specific chore. For collectors, one of the many appealing aspects of antique and vintage pliers made by companies such as Klein, Knipex, Craftsman, Crescent, Fulton, Billings, Danielson, Keen Kutter, Stanley, Harrold, ChannelLock, Vise-Grip, and Snap-on is their durability, which means a drop of oil is sometimes all it takes to put a rusty old pair of nippers, diagonal pliers, or pincers back to work.