People who found this interesting may also be interested in historian David Hackett Fisher's book "The Great Wave". He examines the possible correlation of consumables prices to societal upheavals from the mid 1200s on.
The Price of Nails Since 1695
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#12[deleted]
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why nails? They are a basic manufactured product whose form and quality have changed relatively little over the last three centuries While 'somewhat' true, its also untrue. Modern nails are different from the nails in the 60's. Modern nails are rounded. Many of the 1960s nails are square with sharp edges, a completely different manufacturing technique. I imagine that these were either forged in shape or cut from sq…
According to Wikipedia’s history of nails, wire (round) nails came out in about 1860. I’ve lived in 4 houses built before 1930 That were all full of them. Cut nails continued to be used for masonry through the present.
What about galvanized nails? Surely those did not exist even 150 years ago?
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#14I hadn't realized how valuable and useful nails were until I toured Monticello, and there was a nailery out back. I.e. you couldn't just go buy a bag of nails, you had to make them yourself.
[deleted]
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#15I hadn't realized how valuable and useful nails were until I toured Monticello, and there was a nailery out back. I.e. you couldn't just go buy a bag of nails, you had to make them yourself.
> you had to make them yourself
Well... not quite...
> Up to fourteen young male slaves, aged ten to twenty-one, worked at the forges of the nailery. From 1794 to 1796, while he was in temporary retirement at Monticello, Jefferson calculated the efficiency of the nailers, each day weighing their nail rod and the nails they produced.
(Source: https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/nai...)
Though it would seem the idea was to then sell the nails for extra income (TJ was always strapped for cash), so it's kind of an ugly stop on the way to "what if you could just go buy a bag of nails?"
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#16The Odd Lots podcast had a great interview with the paper's author, here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/this-is-w...
Audio (available on various podcast platforms):
* https://player.fm/series/series-1504378/this-is-what-happene...
They've done a done quite a few on the supply chain: two on lumber, shipping containers, shipping pallets, separate ones on TSMC and ASML (and RISC-V), ports, marine transport/shipping, rail, trucking.
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#17The Odd Lots podcast had a great interview with the paper's author, here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/this-is-w...
The NPR show "The Indicator" also had an interview:
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072557499/what-nails-can-tel...
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#18> Why nails? They are a basic manufactured product whose form and quality have changed relatively little over the last three centuries This is probably more true for nails than many other things. It also has problems when looking at the details with (older style) cut nails working better than wire nails in some applications but being more expensive. The article discusses these but I would have liked it if the article…
> Why nails? They are a basic manufactured product whose form and quality have changed relatively little over the last three centuries While 'somewhat' true, its also untrue. Modern nails are different from the nails in the 60's. Modern nails are rounded. Many of the 1960s nails are square with sharp edges, a completely different manufacturing technique. I imagine that these were either forged in shape or cut from sq…
> Modern nails are different from the nails in the 60's.
The variation of types is noted in the paper; for example:
> How best to account for identifiable differences in holding power, shipping costs, and any other relevant characteristics of different types of nails? One modern approach is to construct a so-called hedonic price index that would use statistical techniques to explicitly account for all relevant characteristics of nails and for how the marketplace valued those characteristics. Data limitations make that impossible in this case. Thus, I use another common technique, a matched- model procedure. This methodology links the cents-per-nail prices in Figure 3 across the switchover points from one type of nail to another; this linking will accurately adjust for quality change to the extent that the rice/performance ratio for nails was equalized by the market in periods when multiple types of nails were available. This approach is a sensible and widely used methodology to construct a consistent price index that adjusts for changes in quality over time so that like can be compared to like given available data. Specifically, I start with the prices for the most recent period (the black segment for wire nails), and then link backwards. In each of the crossover years (1890, 1814, and 1784), I use the price from the more recent type of nail and link and extend backwards from that year using percent changes in prices for the earlier type of nails in the earlier years.
Different types of nails is also brought up in an interview with the author on the Odd Lots podcast (Feb 7):
* https://player.fm/series/series-1504378/this-is-what-happene...
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#19I hadn't realized how valuable and useful nails were until I toured Monticello, and there was a nailery out back. I.e. you couldn't just go buy a bag of nails, you had to make them yourself.
Once upon a time nails were valuable enough to be passed on to offspring in the estate of a deceased person.
It was also pretty common to recycle them when taking something apart, not to remelt them but simply to re-use them after straightening.
Re: The Price of Nails Since 1695
#20its quite fascinating what you can do with really simple tools. some nails, a hammer, a saw, a piece of string, a bubble level, and measurement tools. highly optimized tool set.
Lovely that you added the piece of string in there, that's about the most multi-functional tool there is. Plumbbob (using a large nail as weight!), level line, marker, fixture (and many others) all at once.