ghteen distinct hands hardly
more than fifty years ago.

Pins are made of either brass or iron wire. Those made of the latter are
much cheaper, as the price of iron wire varies from three to five cents a
pound, while brass wire is usually worth fourteen.

The wire is fed to the machine from large reels. It is first cut into the
proper lengths by a small steel knife, so arranged that when the regular
length of wire is drawn, the knife descends and cuts it off. Next, each
small piece of wire, for we can hardly call it anything else yet, is
headed by a sharp rap from a small automatic hammer. Lastly, the blunt
ends are pointed by passing over a series of rapidly revolving
emery-wheels, and the pin falls, the essentially completed article, into a
large box, at the rate of three or four per second.

The pins are now placed in large vats, filled with soft soap and water, to
be freed from the dirt and grease gathered while passing through the
machine. After being thoroughly washed, they are put in the "hopper,"
mixed with bran or sawdust, to be dried. The hopper is shaken rapidly,
and the clean, dry pins fall out at one side, the sawdust at the other.

The tinning or "silvering" process is next in order. To accomplish this,
the pins are put into a vessel containing a solution of cream of tartar
and tin, and boiled for four or five hours. From this they come forth
bright and silvery-looking, to be dried again as before, previous to the
final operation of polishing.

The pins are now ready to be put on papers. The machine which does this is
perhaps one of the most ingenious ever constructed. Quantities of pins are
thrown from time to time into a rapidly vibrating hopper, which causes
them to pass, one by one, into a trough-like slide, that holds the pins by
the head; consequently the imperfect ones are automatically rejected. They
then slide along a groove to the main body of the machine, where they fall
into slits properly distanced, and are pressed into the paper in rows,
twelve in all, containing five hundred and sixteen pins.

Shield or safety-pins are made in about the same way, only there are
twelve instead of three different stages before the pin issues from the
machine absolutely complete. After this it has to be washed and tinned as
above described.

The factory has more than fifty machines, which operate themselves so
perfectly that they require the supervision of about ten men only.

It has been estimated that