It has been estimated that the average house is built using around 20,000 nails. For this we have American inventor and engineer Jacob Perkins (1766-1849) to thank—not for inventing the nail, which appeared thousands of years before he was born, but for inventing a machine that could produce upward of 200,000 nails per day, introducing mass-produced nails for the first time.
Perkins was born in Massachusetts, and worked for a goldsmith during his teenage years. He became known for creating a multitude of different inventions, of which his nail-making machine was one of his first and most famous. Nails were traditionally handmade by beating out sheets of iron into the required shape, but this was made easier with the invention of mechanical cutting processes by the mid 1700s.
In 1790 Perkins devised his nail-cutting invention, followed five years later by a patent for "a machine to cut and head nails at a single operation." Perkins set up a nail-making factory in his hometown of Newburyport, although eventually others took up his idea and built similar machines. A watermill was used to power the machine, which could cut out and head the nail in a single process. The output was an estimated 200,000 nails per day, swamping previous levels of nail production. The effect was dramatic— nail prices fell by around 70 percent within a few decades, reducing the overall cost of construction. This became increasingly important in the ensuing industrial revolution, when the demand for nails rose.
Perkins continued to innovate, and upon moving to England in 1819 he pioneered the use of steel instead of copper for printing banknotes, as well as producing many useful contrivances.
