one party were to light a dozen
separate fires, and cook a dozen separate meals. The labour of lighting
a fire and cooking for twelve persons is not much greater than doing the
same for one or two. There are many things which, if once done, will
serve for thousands or millions of people. If a person gets important
information, as, for instance, that a storm is coming across the
Atlantic Ocean, he can warn a whole nation by means of the newspapers.
It is a great benefit to have a meteorological office in London, where
two or three men spend their labour in learning the weather all over the
country by means of the telegraph, and thus enable us to judge, as far
as possible, of the weather which is coming. This is a good case of the
#multiplication of services#.

#28. The Multiplication of Copies# is also a means of increasing
immensely the produce of labour. When the proper tools and models for
making a thing are once provided, it is sometimes possible to go on
multiplying copies with little further trouble. To cut the dies for
striking a medal or coin is a very slow and costly work; but, when once
good dies are finished, it is easy to strike a great many coins with
them, and the cost of the striking is very small. The printing press,
however, is the best case of multiplication of copies. To have the whole
of Shakespeare's Plays copied out by a law stationer would cost more
than two hundred pounds, and every new copy would cost as much as the
first. Before the invention of printing, books used to be thus copied
out, and manuscript books were therefore very expensive, besides being
full of mistakes. The whole of Shakespeare's Plays can now be bought for
a shilling; and any one of the Waverley Novels can be had for sixpence.
It may cost several hundred pounds to set up the type for a large book
and stereotype it; but when this is once done, hundreds of thousands of
copies can be struck off, and the cost of each copy is little more than
that of the paper and the binding.

Almost all the common things we use now, such as ordinary chairs and
tables, cups and saucers, teapots, spoons and forks, &c., are made by
machinery, and are copies of an original pattern. A good chair can be
bought for five shillings or less, but if you wanted to have a chair
made of a new pattern, it would cost perhaps five or ten times as much.

#29. Personal Adaptation.# A further advantage of the division of labour
is that, when there are many differ