fashion about the same period. In this "Augustan age" of the
Birmingham button industry, when there was a large export trade, the
profits of manufacturers who worked on only a modest scale amounted to
L3000 and L4000 a year, and workmen earned from L2 to L4 a week. At one
time the buttons had each to be fashioned separately by skilled artisans,
but gradually the cost of production was lessened by the adoption of
mechanical processes, and instead of being turned out singly and engraved
or otherwise ornamented by hand, they came to be stamped out in dies which
at once shape them and impress them with the desired pattern. Ivory buttons
are among the oldest of all. Horn buttons were made at Birmingham at least
by 1777; towards the middle of the igth century Emile Bassot invented a
widely-used process for producing them from the hoofs of cattle, which were
softened by boiling. Pearl buttons are made from pearl oyster shells
obtained from various parts of the world, and after being cut out by
tubular drills are shaped and polished by machinery. Buttons of vegetable
ivory can be readily dyed. Glass buttons are especially made in Bohemia, as
also are those of porcelain, which were invented about 1840 by an
Englishman, R. Prosser of Birmingham. In the United States few buttons were
made until the beginning of the 19th century, when the manufacture of metal
buttons was started at Waterbury, Conn., which is now the centre of that
industry. In 1812 Aaron Benedict began to make ivory and horn buttons at
the same place. Buttons of vegetable ivory, now one of the most important
branches of the American button industry, were first made at Leeds, Mass.,
in 1859 by an Englishman, A.W. Critchlow, and in 1875 commercial success
was attained in the production of composition buttons at Springfield, Mass.
Pearl buttons were made on a small scale in 1855, but their manufacture
received an enormous impetus in the last decade of the 19th century, when
J.F. Boepple began, at Muscatine, Iowa, to utilize the unio or "niggerhead"
shells found along the Mississippi. By 1905 the annual output of these
"fresh-water pearl" buttons had reached 11,405,723 gross, worth $3,359,167,
or 36.6% of the total value of the buttons produced in the United States.
In the same year the mother-of-pearl buttons ("ocean pearl buttons")
numbered 1,737,830 gross, worth $1,511,107, and the two kinds together
constituted 44% of the number, and 53.9% of the value, of the button