Spanner in the Works

The image is straightforward: a spanner (wrench) thrown into working machinery would jam or wreck it. Where it gets murkier is who coined the English phrase first. One popular theory credits the Luddites, early 19th-century textile workers who smashed weaving machines in protest, though no documented source actually ties them to this specific phrase rather than the general practice of machine sabotage. The British wording is confirmed in print by P. G. Wodehouse's 1934 novel Right Ho, Jeeves: "he was throwing a spanner into the works." An American version using "wrench" instead of "spanner" is attested earlier, in the Chicago Tribune in 1907. A colourful story about a dropped spanner sabotaging an early New Zealand oil well is often repeated too, but has no documentary support and looks like folklore built around the phrase rather than its source.