INVENTOR OF THE SEWING MACHINE
BIRTHPLACE OF ELIAS HOWE
Amid these humble surroundings the inventor of the sewing machine was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819.
BEFORE THE WAR
A sewing machine of 1851.
Very different, but also of great value, was the service rendered by Elias Howe of sewing machine fame. There are two stories as to the genesis of this wonderful labor-saving device. One is that it was suggested to Howe by the chance remark of a visitor to the Boston machine shop in which he was employed. The other and more romantic story is that the idea of a machine for sewing garments originated from a desire on Howe’s part to lighten the labor of his wife, who, when he was ill and out of work, was obliged to take in sewing and toil far into the night.
Whichever version is correct, it is certain that in 1843 (Howe was then only twenty-four years old) he set to work in the garret of his father’s home in Cambridge, and about a year later gave to the world a sewing machine that embodied the principal features of the most up-to-date models of the present day. For long, however, the world was reluctant to accept this splendid invention. The tailors of Boston, to whom he first offered it, refused to adopt it, on the ground that it would ruin their business; and later, in New York, there were anti-sewing machine demonstrations, fomented by labor leaders, who failed to realize that in the end labor-saving devices of any real merit were always certain to increase, not decrease, the demand and opportunities for the workingman and workingwoman.
A SEWING MACHINE OF 1860
“It has stitched many hundred miles of seam, and is still in good working order.”
In the case of the sewing machine the truth of this has long since been demonstrated. Not only has it become a familiar household adjunct, freeing millions of women from the slavery of the needle, and thus most effectively answering the piteous plea of Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” but it has also brought about a marvelous expansion of the clothing industry. It has in fact created an entirely new and most important branch of that industry,—the ready-made clothing business,—giving employment to hundreds of thousands of people, and providing well patterned and well finished garments at prices undreamed of in other days. Surely Howe, no less than Fulton and Whitney, deserves to be regarded as a benefactor of humanity.
So, too, with Samuel F. B. Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell, the one the father of the electric telegraph, the other the inventor of the telephone. If anybody had told Samuel Morse in 1811, when as a youth of twenty he sailed from New York to Liverpool to study painting under Benjamin West, that he would be known to posterity as an inventor rather than as an artist, he would have laughed the prophecy to scorn. But, as has happened to other gifted men, circumstances conspired to turn and fix the thoughts of this brilliant son of New England on problems unconnected with the routine of his daily life, yet appealing to him with such force as to change the whole course of his career.
THE FIRST BOBBIN WINDER