19th Century Scientific American Online

Elias Howe first heard the term sewing machine while working in Boston for Ari Davis, who made and repaired precision instruments. People had been trying to invent such a device for half a century in America and abroad, without any great success. Some early devices patented in England simply did not work. A functional sewing machine, introduced by French tailor Barthelemy Thimonnier in 1830, roused tailors to radical action. Fearing that they would be put out of business by the laborsaving equipment, they stormed and destroyed Thimonnier's eightymachine plant. The inventor fled and later died a bankrupt. In 1834, Walter Hunt, credited with creating a forerunner of the Winchester re

peating rifle and the safety pin, built America's first sewing machine but lost interest in a device he saw as a destroyer of jobs. But Ari Davis thought such a machine would make someone a fortune, and Howe took his employer's opinions to heart.

Born in 1819 in Spencer, Massachusetts, Howe had apprenticed to a textile mill at sixteen, then, unemployed after the panic of 1837, moved to the big city to seek work and apprenticed to Davis. By the early 1840s, he had married and

had children to support. But Howe, always in frail health, became too ill to work. His wife began to take in sewing to pay the growing family's bills. Watching her at work, Howe realized that no machine would be able to duplicate the motions of hand and arm in sewing. Instead, he hit on a process that used thread from two different sources. A needle with its eye at the point would push through the cloth, creating a loop of thread on the far side; then a shuttle would slip thread through the loop, creating a tight lock stitch.

As he began to build his device, misfortune dogged him. His workshop burned down, and his machines turned out to cost some $300 each, far more than most households could afford. In an 1845 demonstration, his invention out-sewed five seamstresses, but he was unable to sell a single machine. Armed with an 1846 patent, he tried to promote sales of the device in England but was swindled out of his British royalties. Then, unemployed and desperate, Howe accepted a meager three pounds a week offered by the swindler to improve the pirated design. Once that had been achieved, however, Howe was fired. He managed to ship his family home, then pawned his patent model and papers to buy his own passage back to America. Soon after his return to Boston, his loyal wife died.

The sewing-machine business, however, was flourishing. Howe found that in his absence other inventors had usurped his discovery and sewing machines of various designs were everywhere in use. The most successful was that of Isaac Singer, who combined mechanical talent with the marketing

flair that Howe lacked. Singer's sewing machine differed from Howe's: Its needle moved up and down, rather than sideways, and it was powered by a treadle rather than a hand crank. But it used the same lock stitch process and a similar needle.

Funded by a mortgage on his father's farm, Howe went to court and began to sue the infringers. After years of legal battles, his patent was upheld in 1854, and Singer was ordered to pay fifteen thousand dollars in back royalties. When the various manufacturers pooled their patents in 1856, Howe managed to negotiate a five-dollar royalty for each machine sold in the United States and one dollar for each sold abroad. The deal brought him two million dollars, the wealth he had dreamed of years before. But the struggle had taken its toll, and the forty-eightyear-old Howe died in 1867, the year his patent expired.

Editor's Note: If you have any information on Howe you would like to add or any online links we will be glad to add them.

[ From "Libraries of Curious and Unusual Facts, Inventive Genius", Time Life Books, ISBN 0-8094-7699-1 ]