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Show PINS AND NEEDLES. Census bulletin No. 85 tells of some of the trifling details of the business of the country which are of passing interest. It tells of pins and needles and buttons and lead pencils and a whole lot of other little things winch people .use eyery day and without which they would hardly know how to get along. Nearly twenty billions of pins were produced pro-duced in the country in 1905. That many pins, if placed end to end, would reach something like 400,000 miles. But of course nobody would at- tempt to place more than two or three pins in a row, so that it doesn't make much difference how far they would extend. Along with the pins went 240,000,000 needles, about three needles for each man, woman and child in the country, or one needle for each eighty pins. It would be hardly fair to infer from these figures that eighty persons have their clothes pinned together where one has them properly sewed, but the figures show plainly that a stitch in time saves more than nine. In the needle statistics it is notable that there are no hand-sewing, darning, crochet, tape or knitting needles made in this country. Buttons, 4,176,000,-000 4,176,000,-000 of them, were made in the same year in twenty-one states. More than half of this number were pearj. The lead pencil industry is a big one notwithstanding notwith-standing there is a vast importation from foreign lands. There were 308,S50,01G wood-encased pencils pen-cils made here. Besides the pencils there were 4,-310,400 4,-310,400 fountain pens, which number will be vastly increased when the new Salt Lake pen factory enter! en-ter! into the statistics of the census bureau. According Ac-cording to these figures each person ought to have three pretty good pencils and a stub in his pocket, and every twentieth person ought to have a fountain foun-tain pen. Measured in dollars, the annual production of pins and needles, buttons, pencils and fountain pens is worth something over $20,000,000, and there are about 19,000 wage earners employed. |