A week’s work in Birmingham in its aggregate results is something wonderful. It comprises the fabrication of fourteen millions of pens, six thousand bedsteads, seven thousand guns, three hundred million of cut nails, one hundred million of buttons, one thousand saddles, five millions of copper or bronze coins, twenty thousand pairs of spectacles, six tons of papier-mâché ware, £30,000 worth of jewellery, four thousand miles of iron and steel wire, two tons of pins, five tons of hairpins, hooks and eyes and eyelets, one hundred and thirty thousand gross of wood screws, five hundred tons of nuts, screw bolts, spikes and rivets, fifty tons of wrought-iron hinges, three hundred and fifty miles length of wax for vestas, forty tons of refined metal, forty tons of German silver, one thousand dozen offenders, three thousand five hundred bellows, a thousand roasting jacks, one hundred and fifty sewing machines, eight hundred tons of brass and copper wares, besides an almost endless multitude of miscellaneous articles of which no statistics can be given, but which, like those enumerated, find employment for hundreds and thousands of busy hands, and are destined to supply the manifold wants of humanity from China to Peru.
Birmingham Weekly Post, 9 July 1892