Another of the great victories of peace was won by Elias Howe, when, in 1844, he invented a machine which would sew. Strangely enough, he was at first regarded as an enemy of humanity, rather than as a friend; an enemy, especially, of the poor sewing-women who earned a pitiful living with the needle. Few had the foresight to perceive that it was these very women whose toil he was doing most to lighten!
Elias Howe, born in Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819, as the son of a poor miller, and was put to work at the age of six to contribute his mite to the support of the family. He was a frail child and slightly lame, so that, after trying in vain to do farm labor, he went to work in the mill, and afterwards in a machine shop, where he learned to be a first-class machinist—knowledge which, at a later day, was to stand him in good stead. He married, at the age of twenty-one, and three children were born to him. Then came a period of illness, during which the young mother supported the family by sewing; and as Howe lay upon his bed, watching his wife at this tedious labor, the thought came to him what a blessing it would be to mankind if a machine could be devised to do that work.
The idea remained with him, and finally led to experiments. Of the many disappointments, the long months of patient labor, the intense thought, the repeated failures, there is not room to tell here; but at last he hit upon the solution of the problem—the use of two threads, making the stitch by means of a shuttle and a needle with the eye near the point. In October, 1844, he produced a rude machine which would actually sew. Another year was spent in perfecting it, while he kept his family from starvation by doing such odd jobs as he could find, and in the winter of 1845, he was ready to introduce his machine to the public.
But here an unforeseen difficulty arose. The public refused to have anything to do with the machine. The tailors declared it would ruin their trade, and refused to try it; nobody could be found who would invest a dollar in it; and Howe, in despair, was forced to put his invention away and to accept a place as railway engineer in order to support his family. Some disastrous years followed, his wife died, and he was left in absolute poverty, but at last came a ray of light. A man named Bliss became interested in Howe's invention, and a few machines were made and marketed in New York. Riots among the workingmen followed, so serious that for a time the use of the machines was stopped; but no human power could stay the wheel of progress, and as the value of the invention came to be recognized, all opposition to it faded away. Howe's royalties grew to enormous proportions, but he had been broken in health by his years of struggle and hardship, and lived only a few years to enjoy them.
George Henry Corliss was another mechanical genius, who, in one respect, anticipated Howe, for about 1842 he actually invented a machine for stitching leather. That was two years before Howe made his discovery. But Corliss was soon attracted to other work, and the development of the sewing machine was left for the other inventor. It was in 1846 that Corliss began to develop those improvements in the steam engine which were to revolutionize its construction. One trouble with the steam engine as then built was that it was not uniform in motion. That is, if the engine was running a lot of machines their speed would vary from moment to moment, as they were started or stopped. For instance, a hundred looms, all running at once, would run at a certain speed, but if some of them were shut off, the speed of the others would increase, so that it was very difficult to regulate them. Again, there was a tremendous waste of power, so that the fuel consumption was out of all proportion to the power actually developed.
It was these defects that Corliss set himself to remedy, and he did it simply by taking a load off the governor, which had always been used to move the throttle-valve. In the Corliss engine, the governor simply indicated to the valves the work to be done, and the saving of fuel was so great that the inventor often installed his engine under a contract to take the saving in coal-bills from a certain period as his pay. One of his great achievements was the construction of a 1400 horse power engine to move all the machinery at the centennial exposition at Philadelphia, in 1876. The engine, which worked splendidly, was one of the sights of the exposition.
What the sewing-machine is to the needle, the typewriter is to the pen. No other one invention has so revolutionized business, and the credit for the invention of a practicable typewriting machine is due to C. Latham Sholes. Others had tried their hands at the problem before he took it up, but he was the first to hit upon its solution—a number of type-bars carrying the letters of the alphabet operated by levers and striking upon a common centre, past which the paper was carried on a revolving cylinder.
Sholes had a varied and picturesque career. Born in Pennsylvania in 1819, he followed the printer's trade for a number of years, and it was no doubt from the type that he got his idea of engraved dies mounted on type-bars. Finally he removed to Wisconsin, where he edited a paper and soon became prominent in the politics of the state, holding a number of appointive positions. It was in 1866 that he began to experiment with a writing-machine, and his first one, which was patented two years later, was as big as a sewing-machine. Still, it embodied the essential principles of the typewriter as it is made to-day, and after spending five years in perfecting it, Sholes made a contract with E. Remington & Son to manufacture it. It is one of the ironies of fate that the name principally connected with the typewriter in the public mind is that of the manufacturer, the identity of the inventor being completely lost, so far as applied, at least, to the name of any machine.
We have spoken elsewhere of the career of John D. Rockefeller, of the immense fortune he made from petroleum and the manner in which he disposed of a portion of it. It is worth pausing a moment to consider the career of the two men who discovered petroleum, who sunk the first well in search of a larger supply, and who put it on the market. There is scarcely any development of modern life to rank in importance with the introduction of kerosene. It added at once several hours to every day, and who can estimate what these evening hours, spent usually in study or reading, have meant to humanity?