One worker alone might make one pin a day. Split into 18 steps, ten workers make 48,000

Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with an unglamorous example: a pin factory. Making a pin involves roughly eighteen distinct steps, drawing the wire, cutting it, sharpening the point, attaching the head, and Smith argued that splitting these steps among specialised workers, rather than having each person make a whole pin, multiplied output many thousands of times over. It became the founding illustration of the division of labour, though Smith likely never visited one himself.

— Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — 1776, Book I, Chapter 1