Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

NEEDLE AND PIN MAKING. 183 “ Scouring,” the next process, has a large mill devoted entirely to it, where the needles spend about nine days wrapped up, in company with soap and emery powder, in thick canvas, being rolled backwards and forwards under heavy “ runners ” of wood. When finally released from the scouring mill they are perfectly smooth, highly polished, and dark in colour. Women next pick out by hand all broken or imperfect needles, arrange them in order with the heads all at one end of a row, and take away any that have in some way become shorter than their fellows. The speed and certainty with which this is done is truly amazing. 1 he grindstone again comes into play to “ finish ” the heads and sharpen up the points, and then the needles receive their final polish. The “wrapping-room,”in which they are macle up into packets ready for sale, is interesting chiefly on account of the machine at work there counting- out with quite uncanny clever- ness bunches of twenty-five assorted nesdles and delivering them on a tray to the “ sticker ” ready to put up. This work is also done by women, who are largely employed in the making of these especially feminine articles. Almost more indispensable than needles are their companion necessaries, pins, but the mode of their manufacture is very much simpler, one machine doing nearly all the work that in the earlier days of pin-making required twelve or fourteen tedious processes by hand. The firm of Messrs. Kirby, Beard and Co., by whose kindness the writer has been enabled to gather in what fashion pins come into existence, is one of the oldest in the trade, dating back to the year 1743, and a sketch of their factory at Birmingham will give a good idea of the industry generally. From the “ wire-drawing shop,” where the wire, placed in coils on revolving blocks, is drawn through holes in a steel plate to the various sizes required for making the different sized pins, one passes into the pin-making room itself. Here are rows of machines moved by steam power, which turn out pins at the rate of 180 to 220 per minute, the only hand labour in the whole process being the removing of the finished pins by the em- ployees looking after the machines. W atching the modus operandi of one of these unresting workers of steel and iron, one sees the end of a coil of brass wire on a 1 evol ving drum passing through a hole into the machine, being straightened and kept in its place meanwhile by iron pegs. It is seized by a pair of sliding pincers which put it through another hole, and as it comes out on the other side a little hammer strikes it, forming by successive blows the head of the pin. 1 hen down comes a sharp shears, and cuts oft the required length of wire. Headed and cut, but pointless, the embryo pin falls into a slanting groove too narrow for its head to pass through, and thus a row of pins hanging by their heads appear along the front of the machine. These are carried backwards and forwards over a revolving cylindrical file with a graduated surface; their ends are held against the file, and in this way they are pointed, and drop into a receptacle beneath. 1 he next step is “ silvering,” for the pins, although they come from the machine perfect