Nail Making in the Black Country

By the 18th century, nail making had become an important Black Country industry. The invention of the slitting mill in 1565, which prepared iron rods for the nailers, turned the manufacture of wire nails into a simple process. All that the nail makers had to do was to cut the rod to the correct length, make the head and put a point on the bottom. Large numbers of nails could be made by relatively unskilled people.

This was an early example of mass production. The nailers could not afford to buy the rods themselves, so they were advanced to them by the steel mills, to where they returned the completed nails and were paid for their work. They were also given standard allowances for waste.

Nailing was a seasonal occupation, and dealers spoke of the difficulty of obtaining nails at harvest time. A bundle of rods weighed 60 pounds, and was 4ft 6" long. The nails were characterised according to the number produced from a given weight of iron. Long thousand (1200) nails weighing 4 pounds, were known as four penny bundles. Larger nails were called 100 work, and were priced by the hundred. They were more profitable than the smaller ones, as less work was required to produce them, and less waste produced.

There were many types of nails, some of which go back to the early 16th century:

             brads, tacks, spriggs, dog-eared frost nails, sheath nails, and sparrables.

The introduction of machine nailing in 1810 led to a further increase in the numbers of people employed in the industry.  Most of the small nail-making businesses disappeared during the nineteenth century as mechanisation increased and large numbers of jobs were available in the factories.