Our king's motto:
After all, it is not necessary that it will be good right away and it is not something that should actually be expected from those who work their hard work every day. It will be what it will be. -- Theodor Fontane
It happened at a time when peoples were still very easy to govern and therefore princes and even kings had enough free time and leisure for wood turning:
Huge trunks of the finest wood were brought in, but our king also turned the most wondrous things out of all kinds of stone and bone. If someone tried to remind the king of urgent government business, the king would swear: “I'll make chips for you!” and continue turning diligently with a particularly large turning hook. The royal court mechanic always had to devise and manufacture new lathe accessories for longitudinal and transverse turning, for oval, square, thread, offset turning, guilloche, winding, fluting and copying. Even the royal court turner, who was so respected at court, had trouble keeping track of things, as a comprehensive reference work on wood turning was still missing at the time. “If only Spannagel’s ‘Drechslerwerk' would finally come out!” he was often heard sighing. Because gold played an important role in a royal palace at that time, the royal court mathematician was personally responsible for ensuring that all wood turning work was carried out exactly according to the “golden ratio”. Even the floor of the royal court woodturnery was made of pure gold. The saying: “Crafts have golden soil” has survived to this day, although today people are much more careful to ensure that funding is no longer wasted so badly. The royal court physician was also almost constantly present in the royal court woodturnery: we can still find the first, now dusty, studies on health damage caused by wood dust from this period in old archives. In short, woodturning soon became so important to our king that almost the entire royal court was occupied with the constant expansion of the royal court turning industry. Only the royal court jester was not allowed to take part. (Court jesters were - at that time - generally considered stupid!) The court jester was very annoyed because he would have loved to have owned a jester's staff that he had made himself. That's why he made a cynical rhyme about woodturning: "I'm the woodturner in a hurry, what I can't turn, I file." But since our king was basically a very thrifty man - how else would a king be royal? One day he said: “Stop the waste! From now on we will only turn very tiny objects.” The royal treasurer, who had long observed with concern the huge sums of money consumed by the king's passion for turning, breathed a sigh of relief. But because the king had to look more closely when turning the small objects and had to bend a little deeper over the lathe, his heavy golden royal crown kept slipping into his face. Relaxed and concentrated work was impossible even for our king. To vent his anger, the distraught king forcefully threw an ornately chased square onto the golden workshop floor. After the chisel had gotten caught a few times due to the view being blocked by the slipped crown and had produced the dreaded "Nurembergers" on the workpiece, which were not worthy of a turning king, the king's patience had completely run out and he angrily tore his crown off his head, to immediately turn them back upside down, which a king without a crown would be worse than a wood turner without his well-kept supply of wood. From now on, turning the small parts was much easier by hand, because the royal crown could no longer slip: the prongs of the heavy golden crown had cut deep into the royal scalp and gave it a firm hold. The royal court turner, who had acquired a sharp eye and a sharp mind over the years through the constant sharpening of the royal turning knives, concluded: “The king could solve a problem by turning something. It should be possible to apply this simple principle advantageously to other situations. The royal court woodturner picked up the square that the king had thrown to the ground in his anger. By simply turning it over and placing it again on an angle that had previously been marked with it, he could now easily check whether the angle had lost its accuracy due to the fall. The royal court chronicler was hastily summoned to certify the exact date of the invention of the envelope method with the royal seal. Encouraged by this partial success, the court woodturner suggested to his king that he should try out the advantages of turning the entire lathe over. Although the king - as already mentioned - was reluctant to be interrupted while he was turning, he agreed because he was dependent on the ingenuity of his royal court turner. “It works like with your left hand!” exclaimed the king enthusiastically after the first attempt. “Like peeling a potato!” added the somewhat cheeky royal court chef who was serving the snacks during the break. Our king immediately took the cook aside and ordered him to keep quiet. Because once the people start thinking about whether some traditional things wouldn't work better if the sides were simply swapped, that could end badly for a king.