Technology

“The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgement with which it is anywhere directed or applied, seems to have been the effects of the division of labor.

The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will be more easily understood, by considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures...To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, that of the pin-maker. A workman not educated to this business, nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labor has probably given occasion) could scarce, perhaps with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day ...

But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades ... In this way, ten persons could make among them upwards of 48 thousand pins in a day.“

From the beginning of Chapter 1 in "The Wealth of Nations" 
by Adam Smith in 1776