ools are supposedly what distinguishes man from the animal kingdom; only man makes and uses them. The first tool was certainly no more than a stone or stick picked up from the ground and used to crush or poke at some other object. But early man soon got much more clever. Stone Age men may have used stone tools but not just any old stone he found lying around. Ancient man would travel many miles to find just the right piece of flint and take it to a skilled flint knapper who would carefully and skilfully turn the greenish grey stone into a variety of specialist shapes be it a knife blade, an axe or an arrow head. Ever since those very ancient times man has persisted in making tools, and each epoch of history has seen better ones emerge. The Bronze Age which followed the Stone Age, produced many more hand tools with which to craft not only goods but also other, even more sophisticated tools than simply knives, spear points and hammers. It was through the Iron Age and the Industrial Revolution, which it eventually gave birth to, which saw the full flowering of the toolmaking culture, and nowhere on Earth did that flower bloom more brightly than in England and in Sheffield in particular. When in 1997 the Kennametal Company acquired the Easterbrook Allcard 'Presto' engineering business based in Sheffield's Penistone Road the new owners brought with them a novel culture of 'focused factories', global control and a huge amount of manufacturing expertise and resources. What Kennametal acquired in exchange was a part of Sheffield's proud industrial heritage and a firm whose roots go back to the early years of Queen Victoria's reign.