Technology and Employment: Pin making and the first industrial revolution’s long tail
This post is by Arthur Daemmrich, the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian Institution, USA <daemmricha@si.edu>
A fourth industrial revolution?
According to a loose coalition of economists, techno-enthusiasts, and other analysts, we are in the early stages of a fourth revolutionary moment, during which innovations in technology bring about major changes to the production of goods and services, and significantly impact employment. The first such transformation came with the industrial revolution of the 1820s-1850s, the second through electrification and the innovation of mass production from 1900–1930, and the third with the introduction and spread of computers and information technology from 1950–1980. In reports backed by the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the United Nations, and numerous consulting firms, excitement about the capacity of new artificial intelligence systems to manage complex tasks — ranging from long-distance trucking to operating the energy grid, to accounting and legal services — is tempered with warnings of sentient machines undercutting employment, data privacy, and even national security. Scholars, critics, and the public consequently have focused their attention on large complex technological systems and big data. But to understand the fourth industrial revolution only in terms of big technology would be to miss key insights about technology, employment, and shifting notions of intelligence that can be drawn from the history of technology. This essay instead looks to the most modest of technologies — the metal pin — across the past 240 years to explore both constancy and change over time.
Visible and invisible drivers of change
In 1776, Adam Smith began his famous text, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, with what sounded like an anecdote. Describing the making of metal pins used to shred and comb fibers, to tailor clothing, and to make combs and brushes, Smith noted that a layperson would struggle to make more than a single pin in a day. A skilled craftsman working alone could make 20 pins. But driven by the “invisible hand” of market forces, pin making was characterized by a division of labor: “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 whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper [packaging].” Smith calculated that 10 workers could produce some 48,000 pins in a day, a major productivity gain over craftsmen working individually.
From Smith’s observation of pin making in the 1770s, two key points emerge at the center of contemporary discussions regarding technology, innovation, and employment. First, both visible and invisible forces are fundamental to the organization of work and the kinds of jobs available at a given historical moment. An “invisible hand” of market forces rewards efficiencies in production. For the individual, the invisible hand means they can build specialized skills and then sell or trade their output. For a small group, in this case the pin making company, new ways to increase production will help the firm prosper relative to competitors. For a larger collective — an economic region or even a nation — an invisible hand guides widespread adoption of specialized labor and greater total economic output using fewer labor hours. At the same time, visible managerial decisions also shape workplace structure. Initial equipment purchases that automate work and increase output relative to hours of human labor typically require significant up-front investments. Buying new technology is not so much driven by invisible market forces as by visible human decisions.
The controversial point — up to the present day — is whether the reorganization of production is driven by managerial choice or by invisible market forces. Will artificial intelligence be installed (at significant cost) in an effort to undermine knowledge workers — as machinery was used to displace skilled labor historically — or will it be so productive that market forces invisibly drive its widespread adoption?
A second key point arising from Smith’s work finds that as products and services become cheaper through the reorganization of work, consumers can buy more of them. A beneficial business cycle of greater production, greater employment (even as efficiency leads to less employment per unit of output), and total overall consumption results. In effect, lower-cost products can stimulate more consumption leading to more job growth. Of course, reduced demand from a general economic recession or from changes to consumer behavior also can lead producers to lower prices but without the benefit of greater demand. Observation of pin making in the 1770s nevertheless drew Smith to the conclusion that cheaper pins arose from the division of labor, and in turn enabled lower-cost production of cloth with significant benefits to broader society.
Several decades after Smith’s groundbreaking study, the industrial revolution would impact employment in ways unforeseen by Smith, but congruent with his theories. Breakthroughs in manufacturing technologies led to both job creation and job destruction, a pattern different from the past but now fundamental to all subsequent technology-based revolutionary periods.
Pin making and employment in the industrial revolution
Some fifty years after Wealth of Nations was published, inventors on both sides of the Atlantic began building machines to automate the pin making process that had captured Smith’s interest. The multi-step nature of the process proved a challenge to automate, but in the course of the 1820s, numerous patents were issued for pin making machines. However, most of them failed to work on a larger scale. For example, the Moses Morse pin machine, the first to be granted a U.S. patent, was characterized by contemporaries as too “intricate or delicate” to work. Prototypes built by inventors may have worked but, when scaled up as larger machines, they jammed or broke apart.
In the 1830s and 1840s, however, a more robust set of machines were developed and put to use. John Ireland Howe, a doctor at the New York City Almshouse, spent over a decade experimenting with different ideas for pin making machines after watching the indebted residents laboriously make pins by hand. Howe incrementally developed a unique rotary process to draw metal, sharpen a point, and form a blunt head from a single strand of wire. The patent for his machine, number 2,013 was issued in 1841. Howe’s patent application included over 20 pages of text, 16 illustrations, and an operating scale model with a small hand crank (see Figure 1). The full-sized machine Howe put into use was powered by central shafts with belts running to the pin makers. In the patent filing, Howe detailed how the machine worked to feed wire with precision, hold and cut it, grind and sharpen a point (using three mills), and form the head of the pin in an additional two steps.
With the backing of New York merchants, Howe had already founded the Howe Manufacturing Company in 1833, even as he was still tinkering with a variety of experimental prototypes for a pin making machine. The company moved to Connecticut in 1836 and grew quickly after he ramped up production. By 1845, Howe employed 70 workers and had sales of $60,000 ($1.85 million in 2018 dollars). Alongside other metal products, Howe’s firm made over 70,000 pins daily on three of his machines. By 1860, improvements to the machinery used to package pins (a low-skill specialization already called out by Adam Smith as a bottleneck) reduced Howe’s workforce to 36. Even as pin making became an American industry, employment as a “pin-sticker” effectively ended.
Other inventors developed machines that made pins through other processes, or carried out additional manufacturing steps to shape the small metal pieces. For example, Walter Bagshaw, a British pin maker who emigrated to the United States in the late 1850s, learned about new approaches to mechanization in the rapidly industrializing city of Lowell. By the time he founded the Bagshaw Company in 1870, Lowell had become the center of U.S. textile production, drawing on water and steam power. In addition to pins for textiles, Bagshaw patented machines to produce combs, curling tongs (used by men on their mustaches), shoddy pickers (used to separate useable thread from cloth in recycling), and other tools and instruments that extended applications for metal pins (see Figure 2). Within a few years, Bagshaw employed some 70 workers, largely in the production, packing, and shipping of pins.
Between the 1840s and 1870s, the United States shifted from importing textile pins to become a leading manufacturing site for their production, use, and even export. Employment in the industry went from a few people working in almshouses to several thousand high- and low-skilled workers in factories in Connecticut and Massachusetts. At the same time, British manufacturers of pins saw a decline from 11 factories in Gloucestershire in 1820 to zero by 1870 and from hundreds of firms in Birmingham to fifty by 1900. The mechanization of pin making also had an impact on U.S. clothing production. As pins became cheaper, clothing production costs also declined (thanks also to the invention of new spinning and weaving machines and changes to the agricultural system that produced cotton), and consumers began to purchase more outfits. Working in concert, the invisible hand of the market — and entrepreneurs’ visible hand(s) of mechanization and specialized labor — led to more production, lower purchaser costs, new uses for the cheaper pins, and even more demand in a virtuous cycle that drove further industrialization and increased employment.
However, even as new waves of machinery were invented after the Civil War, the United States entered a prolonged recessionary period of declining prices and downward pressure on wages. By most analyses, the deflation that took hold in the 1870s and lingered through 1900 resulted from macroeconomic policies, notably holding to the gold standard and the absence of central bank leadership in setting interest rates even as the population grew and trade expanded. But a two-decade period of price declines also resulted from the spread of industrial revolution technologies and greater competition in consumer markets.
Precise data on employment by industrial sector is challenging to find for the 19th century, especially for the hundreds of small manufacturers that rose and later disappeared. Nevertheless, we can tease out several additional nuances concerning the long durée of the first industrial revolution.
First, women and children were crucial to pin making thanks to their smaller hands and work at lower wages. Reports on pin making in the 18th and early 19th century that go beyond Smith’s account to detail working conditions frequently refer to women and children. An 1841 census in England reported 838 females and 492 males employed in pin making in Gloucester and Bristol, a ratio of 1.7 to 1. A government inspector visiting a Birmingham pin making facility on December 8, 1840 found a workshop with dimensions of 24 feet by 20 feet, in which 48 children aged 7 to 10 were working at 7:45 in the evening to “head” and package pins under rather harsh oversight: “the woman was walking about with the cane in her hand, watching the children, and her whole business evidently being to catch them relaxing in their work” (Pike, pp. 183–4). While it took public policy and regulation to free children from such conditions — and to turn “childhood” into a protected period of play and education — the automation of pin production (and thousands of other low-pay mechanical tasks) played a role in reducing demand for their labor.
Second, it is fiendishly challenging to tease out a tidy causal analysis of the relationships between technology and labor, even for something as simple as the industrialization pin making. The Howe machine was hailed in major journals and encyclopedias; one report recounted by the historian Steven Lubar announced: “Those who have any fondness for mechanical ingenuity must see it for themselves … it is difficult to believe the machine is not an intelligent being” (Lubar, p. 256). Ascribing artificial intelligence to machinery has a long history characterized most poignantly by shifting ideas about what counts as human intelligence. Lower-cost pins produced by “intelligent” machines invented by Howe, Bagshaw, and others made it cheaper to produce cloth, combs, and other items. In turn, these industrial and consumer goods made possible greater consumption and supported overall economic growth, even while reducing demand for child labor.
But a story of positive economic development and increased total employment linked to the first industrial revolution also hides very significant tensions. Greater consumption of cloth in the mid-19th century was on the backs of cotton plantation workers. Likewise, although the automation of pin making reduced demand for child labor, other factories involved in clothing production notoriously employed children in horrible conditions. Industrialization was inexorably intertwined with slavery in the United States and with child labor in England and elsewhere; in fact, every industrial revolution has relied on invisible labor, whether slavery on plantations in the 19th century, or horrid conditions in third-world factories making cheap electronics today. There is no truly free ride when increasing the output of goods or services.
Pin making in the second and third industrial revolutions
Companies producing metal pins experienced shifts in demand as a second industrial revolution came into full swing in the early part of the 20th century. The second industrial revolution was characterized by large-scale electrification (of both factories and homes), and by significantly larger and faster manufacturing as exemplified by the Ford production line. Some corporations grew to considerable size, notably in the electrical, chemical, and automobile sectors. Yet some older manufacturers also found new markets during WWI, and as mass consumer culture took hold in the 1920s.
During WWI, demand for pins rose for the production of military uniforms and other uses, including for guns and hinges on metal containers. The Bagshaw company had an uptick in orders as reflected by significant overtime, starting in 1914 and continuing through 1917.
In the inter-war period, Bagshaw tapped into a significant new market: making needles for the phonograph market as recorded music came into everyday use. A number of technologies for voice and then music recording and playback were invented in the latter half of the 19th century, notably Thomas Edison’s phonograph, Alexander Graham Bell’s graphophone and Emile Berliner’s gramophone. With the development of the Victrola line of phonographs in the early 1900s, a mass-market product was born; by 1917, the Victor company was selling some 500,000 annually at distinct price points. The “orthophonic” Victrola introduced in 1925 carried the sounds of the jazz age into households across the country. Bagshaw’s metal needles, sold in tins of 200 in soft, loud, and full-tone, tapped into this new market (see Figure 3). Sales were helped by the fact that they could only be used once. Records produced at the time contained a strong abrasive that, by design, wore out the needle in order to protect the recording. Demand for needles was strong; for example, a notable 1920 order was for 1.75 billion Bagshaw “Brilliantone” needles.
WWII saw an increase in order for pins used in the production of clothing, for hinges, and other military uses. But the post-war era, especially the period of a third industrial revolution from about 1950 to 1980 was a time of significant change for the industries purchasing Bagshaw products. Best characterized as an information processing transformation, the third industrial revolution was based on breakthrough technologies for computing, data processing, communications, and visualization. These led to new industries and types of work while other longstanding jobs all but disappeared. For example, a shift to turntables and LPs played with diamond-tipped needles effectively ended pin making for Victrola’s, also putting cabinet makers for the older phonographs out of business. New clothing mills and factories were built in the south, and Bagshaw moved to a former clothing mill in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1949. A significant expansion of international trade, with mass-production of clothing in rapidly industrializing Asian economies, brought a second wave of change to the industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Demand for parts for hand and power tools also dried up as their manufacture shifted to Asia, primarily China.
In a sequence also seen in other industries, surviving pin-makers in the United States and Europe shifted to more sophisticated production, including specialized combs, precision parts, and needles, notably for applications in medicine, aerospace, and electronics. Bagshaw purchased its first computer numerical control (CNC) equipment in the early 2000s. Manufactured by Citizen, which developed the precision lathes to make parts for watches, the CNCs can machine metal parts (bearings, small rods, and pins) to within a thousandth of an inch (.001”) for aerospace and medical uses. Identifying new customers for parts cut on the CNC equipment, Bagshaw today operates 30 machines in 2 shifts, and continues to employ some 40 people making precision parts from drawn metal.
But Bagshaw also still operates some of its 19th century production equipment to make up to 1 million textile pins a day for remaining textile firms in the Carolinas. As other historians of technology have noted in recent years, a strong focus on the new and “disruptive” has blinded us to the old technologies all around us that still matter to daily life. Vinyl records, printed books, radio, and literally hundreds of other technologies from 10, 100, and even 1,000 years ago remain in active use. Importantly, these older technologies are not only here in the static sense. While Bagshaw still makes some metal pins using belt-driven equipment that has been running for over a century, the firm also uses modern production equipment to make metal parts for customers with specialized needs. Innovation through ongoing adaptation is present even in the simplest and oldest of industrial goods.
History’s long tail
As the concept of a fourth industrial revolution takes hold and new policies are written for taxation, trade, and labor, it is instructive to explore the long tail of the first industrial revolution. We often look to technological history for straightforward stories of disruption. The average tenure of companies on the Fortune 500 list has declined from 67 years in 1925, to 33 years in 1965, to 20 years by 1995, to even less today. Failure to deal with technological change, and to identify new markets, are given as leading causes for corporate failure in assessments by consulting firms. Likewise, situations in which one technology completely replaces another make for clean lessons about the failure to adapt to change. Carriage makers did not survive Ford’s mass-marketed automobile. Photos of New York City taken in 1910, 1920, and 1930 show a striking shift: from a streetscape dominated by horses and people walking, to one owned by cars. Pin making machinery, however, tells a more complex story. Innovations from the 1870s are still operating in at least one factory in the United States, even as sophisticated CNC machines have a 30-year lifetime, at most. Old and new can co-exist when supplying different submarkets.
Furthermore, the technological transitions in pin making are interesting in light of present-day concerns that the next wave of artificial intelligence will wipe out employment ranging from trucking to accounting. More realistically, innovations will help certain markets grow and will generate more employment overall, even as some specializations see jobs shrink or disappear. A fourth industrial revolution will also likely hide some of the hidden costs of lower-cost production of goods and services. We now know to look for them, but where? Could public policies be designed in advance, rather than only after today’s equivalent of rooms full of 7-to-10-year-old children, working long into the evenings, become visible?
The trope of “machines coming for your job” has become more widespread in the past five years than any time since at least the 1920s. It offers a self-fulfilling logic to those in the business of converting hype to funding to run their startups, namely that automation is inexorable and the main concern of public policy is to make the world safe for technology. Today’s artificial intelligence can only be thought of as such because we consider coding and sifting massive data sets to be markers of intelligence, just as metal work to make tiny pins was considered a skilled and intelligent craft until it was mechanized.
By looking to the pin instead of to the AI robot, we find an intriguing story of flexibility, adaptation, and innovation across periods of major technological, economic, and social change. From Adam Smith’s division of labor, to automation in the first industrial revolution, to supplying metal pieces machined to a third of the thickness of a sheet of office paper, pin making is a stand-in for thousands of other production technologies that are easily overlooked, but that make up the core of any industrial revolution. A new wave of AI equipment will support both additional change and constancy for companies like Bagshaw. Demand for certain applications — clothing production and medicine — will not change quickly. New demand for precision metal parts may arise for new consumer products or new production lines. And most intriguingly, Bagshaw is presently exploring purchasing a new generation of machine tools that have embedded AI routines to predict when cutters or other parts need to be replaced or serviced. With additional screens to monitor equipment as it runs, the factory will take another evolutionary step in the now-long history of pin making. As before, this will necessitate and reward new skills, but it will not eliminate work or employment.
Sources & Additional Reading
Scott D. Anthony, S. Patrick Viguerie, and Andrew Waldeck, Corporate Longevity: Turbulence Ahead for Large Organizations (Innosight, 2016).
Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Imraan Coovadia, “A Brief History of Pin-Making,” South African Journal of Political Studies 35 (2008), 87–105.
Enno de Boer, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the factories of the future,” https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/operations-blog/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-and-the-factories-of-the-future
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. (Profile Books, 2006).
Richard N. Foster, “Timing Technological Transitions,” Technology in Society 7 (1985), 127–141.
Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700. (Princeton University Press, 2016).
Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (Viking Press, 2010).
Steven Lubar, “Culture and Technological Design in the 19th-Century Pin Industry: John Howe and the Howe Manufacturing Company,” Technology and Culture 28 (1987), 253–282.
E. Roysten Pike, Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. (Routledge, 1966).
Clifford Pratten, “The Manufacture of Pins,” Journal of Economic Literature 18 (March 1980), 93–96.
Gideon Rose, The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader (Council on Foreign Relations, 2016).
Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (World Economic Forum, 2016).
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. (W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776).
Figures
Figure 1: Howe’s 1841 Patent Model
Source: Collections of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian photo NMAH-JN2015–5114 by Jaclyn Nash
Figure 2: Walter Bagshaw’s Curling Tongs
Source: Courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Full-Text and Image Database, http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/patimg.htm
Figure 3: “Brilliantone” needles
Source: W.H. Bagshaw Company
