Drawing pin
short nail or pin used to fasten items to a wall or board for display
A drawing pin (in British English) or thumb tack (in North American English), also called a push-pin, is a short, small pin or nail with a flat, broad head that can be pressed into place with pressure from the thumb, often used for hanging light articles on a wall or noticeboard.
Thumb tacks made of brass, tin or iron may be referred to as brass tacks, brass pins, tin tacks or iron tacks, respectively.
These terms are particularly used in the idiomatic expression to come (or get) down to brass (or otherwise) tacks, meaning to consider basic facts of a situation.
History
The drawing pin was invented in name and first mass-produced in what is now the United States in the mid/late 1750s; the earliest use of the term "drawing pin" is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as 1812. It was said that the use of the newly invented drawing pin to attach notices to school house doors was making significant contribution to the whittling away of their gothic doors. Modern drawing pins were also found as standard in architects' drawing boxes in the late 18th century.
Edwin Moore patented the "push-pin" in the US in 1900 and founded the Moore Push-Pin Company. Moore described them as a pin with a handle. In 1903, in the German town of Lychen, clockmaker Johann Kirsten invented flat-headed pins for use with drawings, although other sources credit Austrian factory owner Heinrich Sachs with inventing a pin pressed from a single disk of metal in 1888. This style of pin, with the pin formed by a cutout from the head, is still widely sold in Austria under the brand 'Sax'.
The public source identifies “Drawing pin” as short nail or pin used to fasten items to a wall or board for display. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Drawing, short and nail.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q406839. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1812, 1900, 1903 and 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “Drawing pin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.