[Embroidering Machine, the Forerunner of the Sewing Machine]—[Sewing Machine of Thomas Saint]—[The Thimonnier Wooden Machine]—[Greenough’s Double Pointed Needle]—[Bean’s Stationary Needle]—[The Howe Sewing Machine]—[Bachelder’s Continuous Feed]—[Improvements of Singer]—[Wilson’s Rotary Hook and Four-Motion Feed]—[The McKay Shoe Sewing Machine]—[Buttonhole Machines]—[Carpet Sewing Machine]—[Statistics].
“With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread—
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the ‘Song of the Shirt.’”
In 1844 Thomas Hood wrote and published his famous “Song of the Shirt,” in which the drudgery of the needle is portrayed with pathetic fidelity. It is not to be supposed that any relation of cause and effect exists between the events, but it is nevertheless a singular fact that about this time Howe commenced work on his great invention, which was patented in 1846, and was the prototype of the modern sewing machine. If the sewing machine had appeared a few years earlier, the “Song of the Shirt” would doubtless never have been written.
From the time of Mother Eve, who crudely stitched together her fig leaves, sewing seems to have been set apart as an occupation peculiarly belonging to women, and it may be that this was the reason why in the history of mechanical progress the sewing machine was so late appearing, for women are not, as a rule, inventors, and none of the sewing machines were invented by women.
In all the preceding centuries of civilization hand sewing was exclusively employed, and it was reserved for the Nineteenth Century to relieve women from the drudgery which for so many centuries had enslaved them.
Embroidery machines had been patented in England by Weisenthal in 1755, and Alsop in 1770, and on July 17, 1790, an English patent, No. 1,764, was granted to Thomas Saint for a crude form of sewing machine, having a horizontal arm and vertical needle. In 1826 a patent was granted in the United States to one Lye for a sewing machine, but no records of the same remain, as all were burned in the fire of 1836. In 1830 B. Thimonnier patented a sewing machine in France, 80 of which, made of wood, were in use in 1841 for sewing army clothing, but they were destroyed by a mob, as many other labor-saving inventions had been before. Between 1832 and 1835 Walter Hunt, of New York, made a lock-stitch sewing machine, but abandoned it. On Feb. 21, 1842, U. S. Pat. No. 2,466 was granted to J. J. Greenough for a sewing machine having a double pointed needle with an eye in the middle, which needle was drawn through the work by pairs of traveling pincers. It was designed for sewing leather, and an awl pierced the hole in advance of the needle. On March 4, 1843, U. S. Pat. No. 2,982 was granted to B. W. Bean for a sewing machine in which the needle was stationary, and the cloth was gathered in crimps or folds and forced over the stationary needle. In 1844, British Pat. No. 10,424 was granted to Fisher and Gibbons for working ornamental designs by machinery, in which two threads were looped together, one passing through the fabric, and the other looping with it on the surface without passing through.
The great epoch of the sewing machine, however, begins with Elias Howe and the sewing machine patented by him Sept. 10, 1846, No. 4,750. Almost everyone is familiar with the modern Howe sewing machine, and it will be therefore more interesting to present the form in which it originally appeared. This is shown in [Fig. 144]. A curved eye-pointed needle was carried at the end of a pendent vibrating lever, which had a motion simulating that of a pick-ax in the hands of a workman. The needle took its thread from a spool situated above the lever, and the tension on the thread was produced by a spring brake whose semicircular end bore upon the spool, the pressure being regulated by a vertical thumb screw. The work was held in a vertical plane by means of a horizontal row of pins projecting from the edge of a thin metal “baster plate,” to which an intermittent motion was given by the teeth of a pinion. Above, and to one side of the “baster plate” was the shuttle race, through which the shuttle carrying the second thread was driven by two strikers, which were operated by two arms and cams located on the horizontal main shaft. As will be seen, this machine bears but little resemblance to any of the modern machines, but it embodied the three essential features which characterize most all practical machines, viz.: a grooved needle with the eye at the point, a shuttle operating on the opposite side of the cloth from the needle to form a lock stitch, and an automatic feed.
