Nails were once so precious that colonists burned houses to recover them
In colonial Virginia, families moving on would sometimes set fire to the house they were leaving, then sift the ashes for its nails. Iron nails were scarce and costly, mostly made by hand in England, and the practice spread so widely that the colony passed a law forbidding people to torch their homes when they moved.
For most of history every nail was forged individually. A smith hammered an iron rod into a tapering point, pushed it through a small hole in an iron nail-header, and pounded the wide end flat against the plate to form the head. Specialist nailers did this work until around 1800, which is where the surname Naylor comes from. Romans used nails on an enormous scale: when their army abandoned the fortress of Inchtuthil in Scotland in 86 to 87 CE, it left behind seven tons of them.
Scarcity made nails a kind of currency. The penny sizing still used for nails probably began in medieval England as the price of a hundred. On Tahiti in the later eighteenth century, James Cook's crews traded nails with islanders whose volcanic homeland had no metal of its own. In the American colonies whole families made nails at home on stormy days and evenings, for their own use and for barter, and Thomas Jefferson proudly called himself a nail maker in a letter.
Machines changed everything. The slitting mill, arriving in England in 1590, sliced iron bars into even rods and spared a great deal of labour. Between 1790 and 1820, inventors in England and the United States mechanised the making of cut nails, which were sheared from iron and roughly square in section; Jacob Perkins patented the process in America in 1795. Cheap cut nails helped a lighter building method called balloon framing spread from the 1830s, pushing aside heavy timber frames joined with wooden pegs.
Then wire won. Nails formed from drawn steel wire overtook cut nails in United States production in 1892, and by 1913 nine in ten manufactured nails were wire. Over roughly a century and a half, between the closing decades of the 1700s and the middle of the twentieth century, the cost of a nail dropped about tenfold, turning a once precious object into one of the cheapest things in any hardware store.
Source: Nail (fastener)
