To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has
been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the
division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it
(to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with
his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this
business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of
branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. 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, to whiten the pins is another;
it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this
manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by
distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small
manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or
three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the
necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in
a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could
make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of
forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they
had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar
business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is,
certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they
are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different
operations.
In every other art and manufacture, the effects of the division of labour are similar to what they are in this
very trifling one; though, in many of them, the labour can neither be so much subdivided, nor reduced to so great
a simplicity of operation. The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every
art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. The separation of different trades and
employments from one another seems to have taken place in consequence of this advantage. This separation, too,
is generally called furthest i