What are cut nails and tacks?

Cut nails, as the name suggests, are nails that are cut from a steel sheet. The sheet is cut into strips of a width that corresponds to the length of the nail and the strip is fed into a press that acts like a powerful guillotine. The tacks are sheared from the strip at an angle, the strip is turned over and the next nail is cut. The sheared edges are very sharp and provide a far superior grip to ordinary round wire nails.

The invention of the cut nail is credited to Jeremiah Wilkinson of Cumberland, Rhode Island, U.S.A. In 1775 he cut slivers of iron with shears and made the heads with a hammer to produce the first tacks. Machines for producing cut nails soon followed and many of them could cut nails and head them in one operation. By about 1785, hand-operated nail making machines had been invented that could cut nails from flat bars or sheets of iron, and soon these were driven by water or steam. 


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 The first machine to work well was produced by Jacob Perkins in 1799 and the first commercially successful machine was designed and patented in 1807 by Jesse Reed, a Massachusetts inventor. His second machine, patented in 1825 revolutionised the cut nail making industry and in 1852 one of the World’s largest manufacturers, La Belle, Riverside Ironworks, Wheeling, West Virginia, started production. The nails were produced using steam-powered Reed machines, many of which are still in use today. 
In 1866 a machine was produced that could cut four rows of nails at a time from a strip. It sold in large numbers and the price of nails fell. By 1895 cheap imports came flooding into the U.K. from Belgium and Germany and half inch tacks sold for less than a penny for a thousand.

Cut nails and tacks vary in length from the shortest tacks, which are about a quarter of an inch long to the 6 inch long nails that are used for fixing floor joists. Headless versions completely sink into timber and are flush with the surface. There are many types of cut nails and tacks and their names are very old. Gimp pins used by upholsterers are named after a ribbon like braided fabric, sprigs are named from the old word for a small twig (a sprig) and brads are nails with a small or off-centre head.
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