I'm sorry in advance, but you taught me something new just now. Potentially a brand new sentence even...

"GLUT ME HARDER DADDY."

I'm not too keen on your weird joke, but okay. The glut has been around since, well, a very long time. It's the predecessor to the modern splitting wedge that is made out a medium to high carbon steel that has been drop forged in a large facility. Drop forging meaning a large open die and ram just squish a large billet of hot steel into a desired shape in about 2-4 blows.

Some gluts are reinforced with rawhide or even iron bands around the neck, which is near the striking surface.

I quite prefer wooden gluts over steel wedges, since I can make as many as I want.

I had no idea what these were called other than 'wedges'. Cool stuff dude!

You can learn about that in a few different books. A couple of them are by Eric Sloane. I think one book is called A Museum of Early American Tools, which is where I have seen the glut.

Is there a different name for the wedges used to split stone, or is "glut" a term used for this principle in general?

The ones usd for splitting stone are referred to as Plug and Feather. The feathers are the L shaped pieces that you set into the hole you've drilled, the plug is the wedge you drive down between the two feathers. When doing this, it makes the feathers go into a V shape and the more you drive the plug down, the feathers act as a wedge that grows. It's not so much driving a wedgde down, that tool is literally meant to pry the stone apart.

I'd forgotten about the feathers. That makes more sense from a 'not pounding the walls into dust' perspective.