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)
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.
