 MR. KNAPP'S ODDITY
by Fred Taylor
A New Joint
One of the first things to be looked at when trying to determine the age of a piece
of older or antique furniture is the type of joinery used in the construction of the piece. Knowing the history of
the technology of various periods goes a long way toward explaining clues about the age of furniture and none is
more important (or accessible) than the type of joint used to secure a drawer.
Mostly what we see are dovetails of a sort. The interlocking dovetail joint came into
general use in the William and Mary period in the late 1600's and very early 1700's and for the first time allowed
the construction of reliable drawers, a device with extremely limited use or convenience until then. Before this
innovation most furniture consisted of simple boxes called coffers or some type of open shelving arrangement and
cabinets with shelves behind doors such as the old court cupboard.
As useful as the dovetail joint started out to be, it did have a serious drawback -
it was hard to make by hand and of course everything of that period was made by hand. By the end of the 18th
century some progress had been made in furniture technology. Rotary saws were on the horizon and all nails were no
longer made one at a time by a blacksmith. The early 1800's saw lots of advancement in machinery for wood working
and by the Civil War mechanized furniture factories were on line but the dovetail drawer joint was still a hold
up.
While the joint had been refined and perfected it was still too difficult to be made
by a machine. Some progress had been made by the use of jigs to help guide the hand powered saws in their cutting
but essentially the dovetail was the last hold out of hand work in a machine era.
Several inventors were hard at work on the problem in the 1860's and most
concentrated on trying to duplicate the hand made dovetail using a machine - that is until Mr. Charles B. Knapp of
Waterloo, Wisconsin applied himself to the task. He did some creative thinking and solved the problem not by
duplicating the dovetail joint but by inventing another type of joint entirely that was at least as good as the
dovetail and could be made by machinery. The joint he came up with has several colloquial names - scallop and
dowel, pin and scallop, half moon - and all describe the new joint which looks like a peg in a half circle on the
side of a drawer. If you look at much old furniture you undoubtedly have seen this unusual looking arrangement and
wondered what the heck it was. Now you know - it is a Knapp joint.
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Knapp joint
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And knowing that you also get some very valuable information
about the age of the piece on which you saw the joint. Mr. Knapp patented his first joint making machine in 1867.
In 1870 he sold the rights to an improved version of the patented machine to a group of investors who formed the
Knapp Dovetailing Company in Northhampton, Mass. The investors proceeded to make further refinements in the machine
and actually put it into production in a factory in 1871 where it proved to be a technological miracle. Where a
skilled cabinetmaker could turn out fifteen or twenty complete drawers a day, on a really good day, the machine, on
any day could turn out two hundred or more and work more than one shift if required. The drawer department had
finally caught up with the rest of the factory.
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