New England Pin C0, #7: "Dr. Howe's Pin-making, Whirligig Carousel"

Photographs of Emery Roth and Lazlo Gyorsok

will be among images used in an upcoming CPTV documentary on

The History of

Stanley Works in New Britain

the program will air Thursday evening

CPTV, 8 PM, May 17

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  "Dr. Howe's Pin-making, Whirligig Carousel"

WIlliam Cowper also described the process of making a pin, but he did it in verse:

One fuses metal o’er the fire,

A second draws it into wire,

The shears another plies;

Who clips in length the brazen thread

From him who, chafing every shred,

Gives all an equal size.

A fifth prepares, exact and round,

The knob with which it must be crown’d;

His follower makes it fast;

And with his mallet and his file

To shape the point, employs awhile

The seventh and the last.

The machine Dr. Howe began building in the abandoned rubber factory had to gear all of those functions except the making of the wire to a single "driving shaft.” The machine's actions had to be adjustable and accurate, not only on the first pin but on the millionth and through varying temperatures and as parts wore. It also needed to be as compact as possible and when the driving shaft turned it had to rhyme like a poem.

I can only imagine riffs and counter-riffs as Dr. Howe’s Rotary Pin Machine began to turn, a whirligig-clockwork-carousel with eight spinning chucks pointing radially outward from a hub, each chuck loaded with a length of wire waiting to be shaped, pointed and headed. All at once the carousel of chucks rotates 45° and stops. Opposite some chucks tiny grinding and filing “mills” are spinning, whirring and rasping as the “mills” begin shuttling in and out as they spin and spit against the wire shafts in the chucks which are spinning in the opposite direction. One mill is shaping, another further on is pointing, a third further yet is polishing, up to five mills can be added, all grinding the shafts to the desired point and finish as so many laborers had once done. Elsewhere around the carousel two "carriers" in circular reciprocating motion, withdraw a pointed shaft from a chuck, turn it and deliver it to gripping dies before retreating just prior to the “upsetting" and “heading" which follow with two metallic snaps (I imagine) as a finished, headed pin is clawed into a hopper while wire fed to an empty chuck is nipped to pin length with a tiny snap. And then the whole carousel-hub of loaded chucks rotates again, moving each future-pin to the next station to repeat the same whirring syncopations, snapping out 24,000 pin per day to the driving shaft’s steady beat.

Designing and building a model required skills, experience and equipment that Howe probably lacked, and he turned to Robert Hoe who had been designing, building and selling printing presses, and Howe moved his efforts to Robert Hoe’s shop. The working model he eventually produced won a silver ribbon at the American Institute Fair of 1832 and was the basis for further improvements and to the solid-headed machines with which he began producing pins in his Birmingham factory on Anson Phelps’s canal in 1841. 

New England Pin Company No. 6, "The Wealth of Nations"

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: "The Wealth of Nations” 

Pins, petty things — lost at the bottom of drawers  — make-shift buttons fastening undergarments. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations called them “trifling" when he famously used them to illustrate how Division of Labor allowed ten workers to make "upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.” — Prickly and dizzying to me, no matter how trifling they are individually.

Smith described the laborers, as many as 18, employed in the making of a single pin. Among them:

"One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business.” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations)

In 1841 John Ireland Howe had just patented a single machine to carry out the labors of all of these men including "the peculiar business," and he brought his formidable machines to Birmingham, Connecticut, where he purchased a site from Anson Phelps and John Howe’s machines made pins “common." 

As previously mentioned, Howe brought his pin-making factory to Birmingham because Anson Phelps's mill village offered a reliable flow of water to turn his machinery, and a reliable flow of wire from which to produce his pins. Elsewhere on the canal Anson Phelps’s managers maintained a wire mill that was processing the English metal he received in exchange for Southern cotton, at the same time Phelps's ships ferried Yankee Peddlers to the mouth of the Mississippi where they would create more demand for his metal by selling Howe’s pins and other metalware in the wild, Wild West. 

Phelps was the middleman with fingers on every action, and he understood the Principle of Pins: Small things accumulate. By 1919, long after Phelps and Howe were gone, eighty-one percent of all common pins sold in the United States were made in Connecticut, and most were made in Brass Valley. From Star Pin in Shelton up the Naugatuck Valley to these buildings of the New England Pin Company in Winsted, pins were made in almost every Valley town, and it’s possible Phelps, who made kettles and clocks and buckles and spoons, also earned a profit somewhere from almost every pin made.