I hadn't realized how valuable and useful nails were until I toured Monticello, and there was a nailery out back. I.e. you couldn't just go buy a bag of nails, you had to make them yourself.
Well... not quite...
> Up to fourteen young male slaves, aged ten to twenty-one, worked at the forges of the nailery. From 1794 to 1796, while he was in temporary retirement at Monticello, Jefferson calculated the efficiency of the nailers, each day weighing their nail rod and the nails they produced.
(Source: https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/nai...)
Though it would seem the idea was to then sell the nails for extra income (TJ was always strapped for cash), so it's kind of an ugly stop on the way to "what if you could just go buy a bag of nails?"
And this impeded trade, manufacture and automation.
But you got me with this topic by 'someone on the internet saying', Natural price formation is the only socio-economic challenge? (-;
regards
It was also pretty common to recycle them when taking something apart, not to remelt them but simply to re-use them after straightening.
When I was kid, my grandfather (born early 1920s in the southern US, so grew up in the Great Depression) had a coffee can in his shop where he'd put pulled nails, that I would get to hammer back straight. Good hammering practice!
[1]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40503/were-iron...