18: Of Raw Materials
The cost of any article is attributable to the quantity of labor required to produce it, though the materials from which it is manufactured have some influence due to the difficulty of obtaining and harvesting them.
The cost of a finished product (a nail) is attributable to the cost of fabricating it: someone must unearth raw ore, someone must extract the iron from the ore into ingots, someone must shape the ingot into a nail, and someone must transport the materials each step of the way. And this is the labor of producing an iron nail.
If the nail is purchased by a carpenter to assemble a chest, then the cost of the nail is included in the cost of the chest, and the customer who buys it compensates for its costs of production along with the work of the carpenter himself and the laborers who provided the other components (the wood, the glue, the paint, and so on).
Precious materials are said to be valued for their scarcity, but their scarcity means that they merely require more labor to locate. The price of gold and emeralds is high because of the labor undertaken by those who seek them out, whose work includes many unfruitful attempts to locate them in the first place.
Some time is spent on the consideration of how painstaking the labor can be to obtain raw materials and transform them into a useful shape and state. It is far more difficult to harvest silk than cotton, hence silk demands a higher price. Its scarcity is the side-effect of this difficulty, as the price demanded would still be high if silk were plentiful (and correspondingly, if it were easier to make it would be less scarce).
And again there are considerations of quality. A rough and crude product can be hacked together with little effort, whereas a fine quality product requires painstaking work to ensure a certain level of quality To make things well requires care and attention, such that less of it is produced over a given amount of time, and such that each unit represents more labor.
Babbage presents tables of figures showing the price of items in comparison to the cost of materials, demonstrating that the range is very wide and that objects that require more labor to fabricate cost many more times the amount of raw materials from which they are made.
His best example is watch parts, which contain very little metal but require painstaking labor to produce at small size and with great precision. The pendulum swing of a watch includes very little iron - and its cost in the author's time was fifty thousand times the value of an ingot of the iron from which it was made.
And there are also differences from the method of manufacture: bar-iron in France is smelted using charcoal, whereas in England it is smelted using coke. Even though the labor to place materials into the smelter and pour the iron is the same, the amount of time it takes is significantly greater with charcoal, hence French iron costs three times as much as English.