The Whitworth thread was the worlds first standard, devised and specified by Joseph Whitworth in 1841. Until then, every industry had used their own screw threads. The new standard specified a 55° thread angle and a thread depth of 0.640327p and a radius of 0.137329p, where p is the pitch. The thread pitch increases with diameter in steps specified on a chart. The Whitworth thread system was later to be adopted as a British Standard to become British Standard Whitworth.

With the adoption of BSW by British railway lines, many of which had previously used their own standard both for threads and for bolt head and nut profiles, and improving manufacturing techniques, it came to dominate British manufacturing.

In the USA, BSW was replaced when steel bolts replaced iron, but was still being used for some aluminium parts as late as the 1960s and 1970s when metric based standards replaced the Imperial ones. In countries such as Australia, BSW is still used though metric standards are becoming increasingly popular.

American Unified Coarse was originally based on almost the same imperial fractions. The Unified thread angle is 60° and has flattened crests (Whitworth crests are rounded). Thread pitch is the same in both systems except that the thread pitch for the 0.5 in bolt is 12 threads per inch (tpi) in BSW vs 13 tpi in the AUC.