In _wire-working_ great advances have been made in machines for making _barbed wire fences_. The French patent to Grassin & Baledans, in 1861, is the first disclosure of a barbed wire fence. This art began practically, however, with the United States patent to Glidden and Vaughan for a barbed wire machine, No. 157,508, December 8, 1874, re-issued March 20, 1877, No. 7,566, and has assumed great proportions. A machine for making wire net is shown in patent to Scarles, No. 380,664, April 3, 1888, and wire picket fence machines are shown in patents to Fultz, No. 298,368, May 13, 1884, and Kitselman, No. 356,322, January 18, 1887. Machines for making wire nails were invented at an early period, but the product found but little favor until about 1880, when they began to be extensively used, and have almost entirely supplanted cut nails for certain classes of work, since their round cross section and lack of taper give great holding power and avoid cutting the grain of the wood. In 1897 the wire nails produced in the United States amounted to 8,997,245 kegs of 100 pounds each, which nearly doubled the output of 1896. The output of cut nails for the same year was 2,106,799 kegs. The bending of wire to form chains without welding the links has long been done for watch chains, etc., but in late years the method has extended to many varieties of heavy chains. The patents to Breul, No. 359,054, March 8, 1887, and No. 467,331, January 19, 1892, are good examples. An interesting class of machines, but one impossible of illustration on account of their complication, are machines for making pins. In earlier times pins had their heads applied in a separate operation. Making pins from wire and forming the heads out of the cut sections began in the Nineteenth Century with Hunt’s British patent No. 4,129, of 1817. This art received its greatest impetus, however, under Wright’s British patent No. 4,955, of 1824. A paper of pins containing a pin for every day in the year, and costing but a few cents, gives no idea to the purchaser of the time, thought and capital expended in machines for making them, and yet were it not for such machines, rapidly cutting coils of wire into lengths, pointing and heading the pins, and sticking them into papers, the world would be deprived of one of its most ubiquitous and useful articles. Many tons of pins are made in the United States weekly, and it is said that 20,000,000 pins a day are required to meet the demand. In the metal working art the making of firearms and projectiles has grown to wonderful proportions. Cutlery and builders’ hardware is an enormous branch; wire-drawing, sheet metal-making, forging, and the making of tools, springs, tin cans, needles, hooks and eyes, nails and tacks, and a thousand minor articles, have grown to such proportions that only a bird’s-eye view of the art is possible.