Today, let's talk about pins. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Needles and pins,
needles and pins,
When a man marries his trouble begins.
goes the old nursery rhyme. The lowly
dressmaker's pin used to be a metaphor for the
commonplace household necessities. Most clothes were
made at home in the early 19th century; and
dressmakers absolutely need pins.
But pins were hard to make. People made them by
hand in production lines, with each person doing
one operation. The popular 18th-century poet,
William Cowper,
described a seven-man pin-production line in a poem
that began:
One fuses metal o'er the fire;
A second draws it into wire; ...
and which continued through to the
finished pin.
But pin-making was actually more complex than
Cowper made it out to be. The 18th-century
economist Adam Smith described 18 separate steps in
the production of a pin. Small wonder then, that
pin-making was one of the first industries to which
the early-19th-century idea of mass production was
directed.
Steven Lubar identifies the first three patents for
automatic pin-making machines in 1814, 1824, and
1832. The last of these -- and the first really
successful one -- was filed by an American
physician named John Howe. Howe's machine was fully
operational by 1841, and Lubar justly calls it "a
marvel of mechanical ingenuity." It took in wire,
moved it through many different processes, and spit
out pins. It was a completely automated robot
driven by a dazzlingly complex array of gears and
cams.
When Howe went into production, the most vexing
part of his operation wasn't making pins but
packaging them. You may have heard the old song:
I'll buy you a paper of pins,
and that's the way our love begins.
Finished pins had to be pushed through
ridges in paper holders, so both the heads and points
would be visible to buyers. It took Howe a long time
to mechanize this part of his operation. Until he
did, the pins were sent out to pin-packers who
operated a slow-moving cottage industry, quite beyond
Howe's control.
It's natural for us to glory in our grander
inventions -- in steam engines and spaceships. But
technology also serves us by easing the nagging
commonplace needs that complicate our lives. Howe's
ingenuity in making the lowly pin easily available
was a very large contribution to 19th-century life
and well-being.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
