There are eighteen steel pen manufacturers in the Birmingham Directory, and eight penholder makers.  Two manufacturers employ about 1,000 hands, and the other seventeen about as many more.

We can most of us remember when a long hard steel pen, which required the nicest management to make it write, cost a shilling, and was used more as a curiosity than as a useful comfortable instrument.  About 1820, or 1821, the first gross of three slit pens was sold wholesale at 7 pounds 4s. the gross of twelve dozen.  A better article is now sold at 6d. a gross.

The cheapest pens are now sold wholesale at 2d. a gross, the best at from 3s.6d. to 5s.; and it has been calculated that Birmingham produces not less than a thousand million steel pens every year.  America is the best foreign customer, in spite of a duty of twenty-four per cent; France ranks next, for the French pens are bad and dear.

Mr. Gillott, who is one of the very first in the steel-pen trade, rose by his own mechanical talents and prudent industry from a very humble station.  He was, we believe, a working mechanic, and invented the first machine for making steel pens, which for a long period he worked with his own hands; he makes a noble use of the wealth he has acquired; his manufactory is in every respect a model for the imitation of his townsmen, as we shall show when we say a few words about the condition of the working population; a liberal patron of our best modern artists, he has made a collection of their works, which is open to the inspection of any respectable stranger.

The following description of his manufactory, which is not open to strangers without special cause shown, will be found interesting in a social as well as a commercial and mechanical point of view.

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GILLOTT’S steel-pen factory.—­In the first department, sheets of steel received from Sheffield are passed through rolling mills driven by steam, under charge of men and boys, until they are reduced to the thinness of a steel pen, to the length of about thirty inches, and the breadth of about three inches.  These steel slips are conveyed to a large roomy workshop, with windows at both sides, scrupulously clean, where are seated in double rows an army of women and girls, from fourteen to forty years of age, who, unlike most of the women employed in Birmingham manufactories, are extremely neat in person and in dress.  A hand press is opposite each; the only sound to be heard is the bump of the press, and the clinking of the small pieces of metal as they fall from the block into the receptacle prepared for them.  One girl of average dexterity is able to punch out one hundred gross per day.  Each division is superintended by a toolmaker, whose business it is to keep the punches and presses in good working condition, to superintend the work generally, and to keep order among the workpeople.

The next operation is to place the blank in a concave die, on which a slight touch from a concave punch produces the shape of a semitube.  The slits and apertures which increase the elasticity of the pen, and the maker’s or vendor’s name, are produced by a similar tool.