Sewing Machine History > Singer

Few inventions have proved as valuable to the world as that of the sewing machine. It ranks high on every list of great inventions and has freed women from drudgery as perhaps no other mechanical device in history. "Next to the plough" wrote Louis Antoine Godey in 1856, "this sewing machine is perhaps humanity's most blessed instrument."

Before the sewing machine appeared, making clothes was the chief occupation of half the human race. Since this work had to be done by hand, it was time consuming and eyestraining.

The 19^th century was an age of invention, and it is not surprising that during this period many men turned their attention to the development of devices for making stitches mechanically. History books have long credited Elias Howe, Jr. with the invention of the sewing machine utilizing an eye-pointed needle and shuttle. The machine in which he won fame was hardly practical and many of the principals which it embodied had been in the inventions of others years earlier. It sewed only straight seams and only a few inches at a time.

Sometime later, between 1790 and 1800, Baltasar Krembs in Mayan, Germany, invented a machine which made an elastic stitch by means of an eye-pointed needle, but he failed to patent his machine. Nevertheless it is still in existence, being on exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

In 1804, John Duncan of Glasgow, Scotland, devised a machine utilizing a barbed-eye needle which produced a chain stitch for use in embroidery, but he did not claim nor did he intend that it be used for making seams.

In 1814, Josef Madersperger, a master tailor of Kufstein in the Austrian Tyrol, made the first sewing machine capable of stitching a seam. His fellow tailors looked askance at his handiwork and he lacked the resources to develop his invention elsewhere. The Madersperger machine used a double pointed needle to produce a simple running stitch. Later he developed an improved machine which utilized a single eye pointed needle and a shuttle, but the arrangement for feeding the material under the needle was faulty. Had he combined the element of the two machines in one, he would have fully the principles on which later sewing machines were based.

In 1818, the Rev. John Adams Dodge of Monkton, Vermont, with the help of John Knowles, the local blacksmith, designed and built a sewing machine. The finished product was cumbersome, using a double pointed needle with the eye in the middle. It could produce a satisfactory backstitch for only short distances.

By 1829, Barthelemy Thimmonier, a poor French tailor, entirely ignorant of the principles of mechanics, produced a workable machine made of wood and capable of making a chain stitch by means of a crochet or barbed needle in which the loops lay on the upper surface of the material being stitched. In 1830, Thimmonier was issued a patent by the French government, and by 1841 eighty of his machines were making uniforms for the French Army. Unfortunately an angry mob of tailors fell upon his machines and smashed them to pieces.

About the same time Thimmonier was perfecting his machine in France, a 39 year old Quaker genius named Walter Hunt created a machine which used an eye-pointed needle moved by a vibrating arm, working in combination with a shuttle carrying a second thread. It made an interlocked stitch fully as well as it is done by our present improved machines. Only in the manner of feeding cloth under the needle was Hunt's machine imperfect. Hunt started to manufacture his machine but abandoned his project after the urging of his fifteen year old daughter who convinced him that it would throw seamstresses out of work. Hunt failed to apply for a patented until 1854 when he belatedly realized his oversight: it was refused him on the grounds of abandonment. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that Hunt perfected the first sewing machine that contained all the elements of practicability.

In 1841 two gentlemen in England named Newton and Archbold designed a chain stitch machine employing an eye-pointed needle, but aside from this bare fact little else is known of their invention. A year later an American, John James Greenough, patented a sewing machine which combined a stitch forming mechanism with a device for presenting work to a double pointed needle with an eye in the middle, but it was not practical in any broad sense and thus was never developed. In the next year, 1843, Dr Frank R. Goulding of Macon, Georgia also created a sewing device but he failed to develop it.

In Boston, Massachusetts in 1839, Elias Howe, Jr., a youth of 20, gravely listened to an argument between his employer and a well-dressed visitor. The visitor had contended a sewing machine would be much more practical than the knitting machine. Howe remembered the words of the visitor and devoted all of his spare time to the invention of such a device. He wasted many months endeavoring to copy the motions of his wifes arm when sewing. Then the idea came to him of using two threads and forming a stitch with the aid of a shuttle. There is no reason to believe that Howe was aware of Walter Hunt's previous work along the same lines. On September 10^th, 1846 a patent was issued on Howe's machine embodying a curve eye-pointed needle carrying an upper thread and operating in a horizontal plane in conjunction with a shuttle for the lower thread to form a lock stitch. However, Howe found no market for his machine in the United States at the time so he went to England to set up manufacture, only to return to the States three years later to find the sewing machine had become celebrated, though his part in its invention was seemingly forgotten.

John A. Bradshaw of Boston, invented and patented in 1848 a lock stitch machine with a reciprocating shuttle. The following year Charles Morey and J.B. Johnson patented a chain stitch machine of limited practicality. Its only real contribution was that it handled the material on a horizontal bed instead of suspending it in a perpendicular plane as most of its predecessors.

On May 8^th, 1849, John Bachelder secured a patent on a two-thread chain stitch machine which, because of its continuous feed and vertical moving needle above a horizontal plate, was destined to be one of the most important sewing machine patents issued. Later in the same year, SC. Blodgett, with the assistance of John A. Lerow, perfected and patented an ingenious lock stitch machine that featured the first continuously moving shuttle that traveled horizontally in an endless rotating baster plate.

A copy of the first Singer machine is in the Smithsonian Institute today. Dr. Frederick J. Lewton, formerly Curator of the Division of Textiles at the Smithsonian, described it as "The first successfully operating and practical sewing machine.

In the past century upwards of 46,000 sewing machine patents of various kinds have been issued. And today there are more than 4,000 different types of sewing machines made.

But none of the machines would have been possible without the prior inventions of men like Singer, Howe, Hunt and the others who established the basic principles on which all subsequent developments have depended. These are the true pioneers-the men who deserve major credit for the invention of the sewing machine.

As you've read it, this article proposes to retrace the history of the invention of the sewing machine. And, thus doing, it will unveil the name of its true creator. Oh reader, be prepared! You're about to discover who saved half the human race!