Adam Smith famously used a pin factory to illustrate the advantages of specialization, choosing this "very trifling manufacture" because the different tasks were performed under one roof: "One man ...

September 26, 2007 Add as a preferred source on Google Add as a preferred source on Google There’s never a safety pin around when you need one, but in most offices, there are plenty of paper clips.

People have fastened sheets of paper together more or less permanently ever since the Chinese invented the stuff in the first or second century A.D. Yet according to the Early Office Museum, the first ...