1800-1820
There is no doubt that the successful late-18th-century improvements in spinning and weaving methods, resulting in increased production of fabrics, had a great effect in spurring inventors to ideas of stitching by machinery. Several efforts were made during the first two decades of the 19th century to produce such machines.
On February 14, 1804, a French patent was issued to Thomas Stone and James Henderson for a “new mechanical principle designed to replace handwork in joining the edges of all kinds of flexible material, and particularly applicable to the manufacture of clothing.”[7] The machine used a common needle and made an overcast stitch in the same manner as hand sewing. A pair of jaws or pincers, imitating the action of the fingers, alternately seized and released the needle on each side of the fabric. The pincers were attached to a pair of arms arranged to be moved backward and forward by “any suitable mechanism.”[8] This machine was capable of making curved or angular as well as straight seams, but it was limited to carrying a short length of thread, necessitating frequent rethreading. The machine may have had some limited use, but it was not commercially successful.
On May 30 of the same year John Duncan, a Glasgow manufacturer, was granted British patent 2,769 for “a new and improved method of tambouring, or raising flowers, figures or other ornaments upon muslins, lawns and other cottons, cloths, or stuffs.” This machine made the chainstitch, using not one but many hooked needles that operated simultaneously. The needles, attached to a bar or carrier, were pushed through the vertically held fabric from the upper right side, which in this case was also the outer side. After passing through it, they were supplied with thread from spools by means of peculiarly formed hooks or thread carriers. The thread was twisted around the needle above the hook, so as to be caught by it, and drawn through to the outer surface. The shaft of the needle was grooved on the hook side and fitted with a slider. This slider closed upon the retraction of the needle from the fabric, holding the thread in place and preventing the hook from catching. The fabric was stretched between two rollers set in an upright frame capable of sliding vertically in a second frame arranged to have longitudinal motion. The combination of these two motions was sufficient to produce any required design. The principle developed by Duncan was used on embroidery machines, in a modified form, for many years. Of several early attempts, his was the first to realize any form of success.
Figure 6.—Chapman’s sewing machine, first eye-pointed needle, 1807. (Smithsonian photo 33299-K.)
A type of rope-stitching machine, which might be considered unimportant to this study, must be included because of its use of the eye-pointed needle, the needle that was to play a most important part in the later development of a practical sewing machine. The earliest reference to the use of a needle with an eye not being required to be passed completely through the fabric it was stitching is found in a machine invented by Edward Walter Chapman, for which he and William Chapman were granted British patent 3,078 on October 30, 1807. The machine (fig. 6) was designed to construct belting or flat banding by stitching together several strands of rope that had been laid side by side. Two needles were required and used alternately. One needle was threaded and then forced through the ropes. On the opposite side the thread was removed from the eye of the first needle before it was withdrawn. The second needle was threaded and the operation repeated. The needles could also be used to draw the thread, rather than push it, through the ropes with the same result. While being stitched, the ropes were held fast and the sewing frame and supporting carriage were moved manually as each stitch was made. Such a machine would be applicable only to the work described, since the necessity of rethreading at every stitch would make it impractical for any other type of sewing.
Another early machine reported to have used the eye-pointed needle to form the chainstitch was invented about 1810 by Balthasar Krems,[9] a hosiery worker of Mayen, Germany. One knitted article produced there was a peaked cap, and Krems’ machine was devised to stitch the turned edges of the cap,[10] which was suspended from wire pins on a moving wheel. The needle of the machine was attached to a horizontal shaft and carried the thread through the fabric. The loop of thread was retained by a hook-shaped pin to become enchained with the next loop at the reentry of the needle. Local history reports that this device may have been used as early as 1800, but the inventor did not patent his machine and apparently made no attempt to commercialize it. No contemporary references to the machine could be found, and use of the machine may have died with the inventor in 1813.