'', an etching by
Henry Martin Pope (1843-1908) The history of the nail is divided roughly into three distinct periods: • Hand-wrought (forged) nail (pre-history until 19th century) • Cut nail (roughly 1800 to 1914) • Wire nail (roughly 1860 to the present) From the late 1700s to the mid-1900s, nail prices fell by a factor of 10; since then nail prices have increased slightly, reflecting in part an upturn in materials prices and a shift toward specialty nails.
Hand wrought , China In hand-working of nails, a smith works an approximately conical iron pin tapering to a point. This is then inserted into a nail-header (also known as a nail-plate), essentially a plate of iron with a small hole in it. The broad end of the pin is slightly wider than the hole of the nail-header: the smith fits the pin into the hole of the nail-header and then hammers the broad end of the pin. Unable to advance through the hole, the broad end is flattened against the nail-header to create a nail-head. In at least some metalworking traditions, nail-headers might have been identical to
draw-plates (a plate bored with tapering holes of different sizes through which wire can be drawn to extrude it to increasingly fine proportions). The
Bible provides a number of references to nails, including the story in
Judges of
Jael the wife of Heber, who drives a nail (or tent-peg) into the temple of a sleeping Canaanite commander; the provision of iron for nails by
King David for what would become
Solomon's Temple; and in connection with the
crucifixion of
Jesus Christ. The
Romans made extensive use of nails. The
Roman army, for example, left behind seven tons of nails when it evacuated the fortress of
Inchtuthil in Perthshire in Scotland in 86 to 87 CE. The term "
penny", as it refers to nails, probably originated in medieval England to describe the price of a
hundred nails. Nails themselves were sufficiently valuable and standardized to be used as an impromptu
medium of exchange;
trading between
James Cook's entourage and
Tahitians in the later half of the 18th century being a notable example with the absence of metals in
Polynesia's volcanic islands until knowledge of the malleable iron came spread following the
breaking apart of
Jacob Roggeveen's abandoned
Afrikaansche Galey wreck by
Takapoto islanders in 1722. Until around 1800 artisans known as
nailers or
nailors made nails by hand – note the surname
Naylor. (Workmen called
slitters cut up iron bars to a suitable size for nailers to work on. From the late 16th century, manual slitters disappeared with the rise of the
slitting mill, which cut bars of iron into rods with an even cross-section, saving much manual effort.) At the time of the
American Revolution,
England was the largest manufacturer of nails in the world. Nails were expensive and difficult to obtain in the
American colonies, so that abandoned houses were sometimes deliberately burned down to allow recovery of used nails from the ashes. This became such a problem in
Virginia that a law was created to stop people from burning their houses when they moved. Families often had small nail-manufacturing setups in their homes; during bad weather and at night, the entire family might work at making nails for their own use and for barter.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter: "In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable. I am myself a nail maker." The growth of the trade in the American colonies was theoretically held back by the prohibition of new slitting mills in America by the
Iron Act, though there is no evidence that the Act was actually enforced. The production of wrought-iron nails continued well into the 19th century, but ultimately was reduced to nails for purposes for which the softer cut nails were unsuitable, including horseshoe nails.
Cut The
slitting mill, introduced to England in 1590, simplified the production of nail rods, but the real first efforts to mechanise the nail-making process itself occurred between 1790 and 1820, initially in England and the United States, when various machines were invented to automate and speed up the process of making nails from bars of wrought iron. Also in
Sweden in the early 1700s
Christopher Polhem produced a nail cutting machine as part of his automated factory. These nails were known as
cut nails because they were produced by cutting iron bars into rods; they were also known as
square nails because of their roughly rectangular
cross section. The cut-nail process was patented in the U.S. by
Jacob Perkins in 1795 and in England by Joseph Dyer, who set up machinery in
Birmingham. The process was designed to cut nails from sheets of iron, while making sure that the fibres of the iron ran down the nails. The Birmingham industry expanded in the following decades, and reached its greatest extent in the 1860s, after which it declined due to competition from wire nails, but continued until the outbreak of World War I. Cut nails were one of the important factors in the increase in
balloon framing beginning in the 1830s and thus the decline of
timber framing with wooden joints. Though still used for historical renovations, and for heavy-duty applications, such as attaching
boards to
masonry walls,
cut nails are much less common today than
wire nails. During the time when the settlers were annexing Texas, the Salish were in the Pacific Northwest using the nail. The nail they used was made of wood, cedar, and copper. They made the wooden ones using a form of carving. The copper nails were made from melting copper and shaping it into a nail form.
Wire Wire nails are formed from wire. Usually coils of wire are drawn through a series of dies to reach a specific diameter, then cut into short rods that are then formed into nails. The nail tip is usually cut by a blade; the head is formed by reshaping the other end of the rod under high pressure. Other dies are used to cut grooves and ridges. Wire nails were also known as "French nails" for their country of origin. Belgian wire nails began to compete in England in 1863.
Joseph Henry Nettlefold was making wire nails at
Smethwick by 1875. With the introduction of cheap wire nails, the use of wrought iron for nail making quickly declined, as more slowly did the production of cut nails. In the United States, in 1892 more steel-wire nails were produced than cut nails. In 1913, 90% of manufactured nails were wire nails. Nails went from being rare and precious to being a cheap mass-produced commodity. Today almost all nails are manufactured from wire, but the term "wire nail" has come to refer to smaller nails, often available in a wider, more precise range of gauges than is typical for larger common and finish nails. Today, many nails are made using the modern rotary principle nail machine, which allows wire feeding, wire cutting and nail head forming to take place in one continuous process of rotating movements. ==Materials==