PINS.



A CORRESPONDENT of the New York Post thus describes pin making: 

"The pin machine is one of the closest approaches that mechanics have made to the dexterity of the human hand. A small machine, about the size of a lady's sewing-machine, only stronger, stands before you. 

On the back side a light belt descends from a long shaft at the ceiling, that drives all the machines, ranged in rows on the floor. 

On the left side of each machine, hangs, on a peg, a small reel of wire that has been straightened by running through a com pound system of small rollers.

"This wire descends, and the end of it enters the machine, which pulls it in and bites it off by inches, incessantly, one hundred and forty bites to the minute. Just as it seizes each bite, a little hammer, with a concave face, hits the end of the wire three taps, and 'upsets' it to a head, while it grips it in a counter-sunk hole between its teeth. With an outward thrust of its tongue, it then lays the pin side-ways in a little groove across the rim of a small wheel that slowly revolves just under its nose. By the external pressure of a stationary hoop, these pins roll in their places, as they are carried under two series of small files, three in each. These files grow finer toward the end of the series. They lie at a slight inclination on the points of the pins, and by a series of cams, levers, and springs, are made to play like ‘lightning.' Thus the pins are pointed and dropped in a little shower into a box.

"Forty machines on this floor make five hundred and sixty pounds of pins daily. 

These are then polished. Two very intelligent machines reject every crooked pin, even the slightest irregularity of form being detected.

"Another automaton assorts half a dozen lengths in as many different boxes, all at once and unerringly, when a careless operator has mixed the contents of boxes from various machines. Lastly, a perfect genius of a machine hangs the pin by the head, in an inclined platform, through as many 'slots' as there are pins in a row on the papers. These slots converge into the exact space, spanning the length of a row. 

Under them runs the strip of pin paper. 

A hand-like part of the machine catches one pin from each of the slots as it falls, and by one movement sticks them all through two corrugated ridges in the paper, from which they are to be picked by taper fingers in boudoirs, and all sorts of human fingers in all sorts of human circumstances. Thus we have its genesis,

"'Tall and slender, straight and thin, Pretty, little, useful pin.'"