Illustrated Theatre Production Guide

CHAPTER 7

HARDWARE

Sometimes it is revealing to look at a word as if it were foreign and to consider the meanings of the root words. When you look at it that way, hardware consists of wares, or products, that are generally made from a hard substance, metal. That could be a fairly good definition of hardware, especially back in the day. Plastics are used now for many hardware items that were once made of steel or brass, but the vast majority of hardware is still metallic in nature. I think that originally the word “hard” was used to differentiate these supplies in name and concept from the wooden structures they were used to connect.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of different types of hardware available today, for use in ...