AMERICAN INDUSTRIES SINCE COLUMBUS. 325 



between jaws furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, 

 leaving a certain portion projecting, which, when beaten flat by 

 a hammer, formed the head. By this process a man might make, 

 toilsomely, perhaps two thousand tacks per day." Arnold, in his 

 History of the State of Rhode Island, claims that " the first cold- 

 cut nail in the world was made in 1777 by Jeremiah Wilkinson, 

 of Cumberland, R. I., who died in 1832, at the advanced age of 

 ninety years." Bishop, speaking of Wilkinson's tacks, says : 

 " They were first cut by a pair of shears (still preserved) from an 

 old chest-lock, and afterwards headed in a smith's vise. Sheet 

 iron was afterwards used, and the process extended to small nails, 

 which he appears to have been one of the first to attempt. They 

 were cut from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a clamp or vise 

 by hand. Pins and needles were made by the same person during 

 the Revolution from wire drawn by himself." Such was the gen- 

 esis of the manufacture of nails in America ; an industry now of 

 the first importance, and which in 1889, after the lapse of little 

 more than a century, produced over eight hundred million pounds 

 of iron, steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this 

 absolutely indispensable manufacture, for the past year, at the 

 rate of over twelve pounds for each individual inhabitant of the 

 United States. As nails enter as a component factor into all 

 structures for domestic, manufacturing, and trade uses, this enor- 

 mous consumption may be taken as a fair index of the develop- 

 ment of the country during the past hundred years. 



The adoption of the Constitution in 1787, followed by the en- 

 actment of the first national patent law in 1790 (previous to the 

 establishment of a national government the several colonies had 

 issued patents for meritorious inventions), powerfully stimulated 

 the inventive genius of the people, and it soon became evident 

 that America was destined to surpass all other nations in the 

 invention and manufacture of labor-saving machinery. 



One of the most important improvements in the manufacture 

 of articles of metal, of which a large number were required of 

 the same kind, was developed by Eli Whitney, the inventor of 

 the cotton-gin, who, disappointed in his expectations relative to 

 that machine, turned to the manufacture of small-arms for the 

 United States Government. In 1798 he erected at Whitneyville, 

 near New Haven, Conn., the first manufactory of fire-arms in 

 which each part was made so exactly to the prescribed dimen- 

 sions that it would fit its intended place in any one of thousands 

 of muskets. Mr. Whitney not only conceived the ideas of the 

 possibility and economic advantages of such perfect workman- 

 ship, but invented the system and much of the machinery by 

 which it was practically accomplished. " Whitney's interchange- 

 able system" has been applied successfully to the manufacture of 



