an innovation and from the increased expense involved. So late as 1839 they were almost unknown to the general public, but in the following ten years they arose to an important place among the manufactures of the town. They were made in eighteen different establishments, all under the pressure of mutual competition to introduce improvements in form and facility of production. The number of manufacturers is now twelve, but the quantity made "for home and exportation" is simply prodigious. It amounts to over 14,000,000 of pens a week. There are 360 men and about 2,000 women and girls employed, and about ten tons of steel used weekly in producing these "small arms" of literature, business, and social intercourse.
It is doubtful if any article of such wide and almost universal use ever was so identified with one man's name as is the steel pen with Joseph Gillott, of Birmingham. Even the pens manufactured by others sent abroad there suggests his name and fame. In ten thousand school-houses scattered over the American continent between the two oceans, a million children are as familiarly acquainted with Joseph Gillott as with Noah Webster. The primer of the one and the pen of the other—twin pioneers of civilization—are making the tour of the western hemisphere together, and leaving behind them a wave and wake of light.
