The Übiquitous Pin.

Otago Witness, Issue 2389, 14 December 1899, Page 52

The Übiquitous Pin.

A Arritcr in the Lady's Realm states that the production of pins in the United Kingdom may be set doAvn at 280,000,000 a Aveek. Up to the year 1840 pins Avere the result of long and tedious manual labour, every single pin being handled by 14 workers before it reached the draper's coiuiter. Now they are made by machinery m millions, and so insignificant is their cost that they are used largely as " change " by those tradesmen Avhose prices run into odd farthings.

But the most interesting point about pins, speaking of them collectively and not individually, is their ultimate fate. Of every hundred- pins that are manufactured it is said that one is worn out or broken, and that the remaining 99 are " lost."

What becomes of them is a question that has never been ansAvered, and the Writer in the Lady's Realm doea not attempt to offer any specious solution of this baffling riddle. The fate of the 280,000,000 pins maaufactured every Aveek is one of those problems that no fellow can understand, and a Dundreary indifference to its solution is the wisest method of avoiding the madness which lurks in any attempt to grapple with it closely.

According to M. Zola, the streets of London are paved Avith hairpins, and if a short-sighted man of letters discovers a hairpin on eA'ery paving-stone it is justifiable to assume that thousands of the commoner pins are lining the cracks and crevices of every pavement and road in the United Kingdom. — Globe.