Concept
Try square
Overview
A try square or try-square is a woodworking tool used for marking and checking 90° angles on pieces of wood. Though woodworkers use many different types of square, the try square is considered one of the essential tools for woodworking.
The square in the name refers to the 90° angle. To try a piece of wood is to check if the edges and faces are straight, flat, and square to one another. A try square is so called because it is used to try how square the workpiece is.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
This is just the idea given above: to divide space, cuts that are called surfaces are necessary; to divide surfaces, cuts that are called lines are necessary; to divide lines, cuts that are called points are necessary; we can go no further, the point can not be divided, so the point is not a continuum. Then lines which can be divided by cuts which are not continua will be continua of one dimension; surfaces which…
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
States what Try square is.
Suppose several tractive forces, variously directed, to be acting on a given body. By what is known among mathematicians as the composition of forces, there may be found for any two of these, a single force of such amount and direction as to produce on the body an exactly equal effect. If in the direction of each of them there be drawn a straight line, and if the lengths of these two straight lines be made…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Try square is.
_It is the same with shape as with size._ Almost all the visible shapes of things are what we call perspective 'distortions.' Square table-tops constantly present two acute and two obtuse angles; circles drawn on our wall-papers, our carpets, or on sheets of paper, usually show like ellipses; parallels approach as they recede; human bodies are foreshortened; and the transitions from one to another of these altering…
William James, Psychology
Close in meaning to Try square; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Chinese philosophy.