Buttonholes

Not long after posting a Garment District tax photograph this morning, I happened to read a New York Times obituary (gift link) for the tailor Martin Greenfield:

The traditionalism of the shop’s techniques is embodied by several century-old buttonhole-cutting machines still in use. A year ago this month, a rusted dial on one of the contraptions indicated that it had cut about 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.

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That number does seem dubious. A machine operating for a century would have cut 10,740,000 buttonholes a year. With a six-day workweek, that’s roughly 30,500 buttonholes a day. With an eight-hour workday, that’s 3812 buttonholes an hour, or sixty-three a minute. And even if the machine were running around the clock, that’d be twenty-one buttonholes a minute.

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March 26: I wrote to the Times and received a reply with a photograph. Yes, 1,074,000,000 buttonholes. And the machines may be well over a century old.