Pins in Eighteen Operations: Adam Smith's Pin Factory

In 1776 Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with a pin workshop. One untrained worker, he wrote, "could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty". Split into about eighteen distinct operations, ten men in a poorly equipped workshop made about twelve pounds of pins a day, at upwards of four thousand middling pins to the pound: over 48,000 pins, or 4,800 per worker. The operations are the blueprint: draw the wire, straighten, cut, point, grind the top, make and fix the head, whiten, and paper. Pins were long made of brass before steel took over, so here the wire is drawn from brass.