ELIAS HOWE
GREAT AMERICAN INVENTORS
Elias Howe
THREE
It is a remarkable fact that some of the greatest and most useful inventions have been bitterly opposed by the very persons whom they were designed to help. The bowmen of olden time resented the introduction of guns; the stage coach lines tried in every way to block the building of railways; and Elias Howe, the inventor of one of the greatest labor saving devices in the world, the sewing machine, was ridiculed, discouraged, and denounced as an enemy of poor sewing women, the ones whose toil he was seeking to lighten. They imagined that with the introduction of the sewing machine their occupation would be taken away.
Elias Howe was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, on July 9, 1819, one of a family of eight children. His father was a farmer and miller, and Elias’ early years were spent in the mill. At the same time he managed to pick up a smattering of education.
He went to Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1835, to work in a cotton mill. Two years later he obtained a place in a Cambridge machine shop, in which his cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, afterward governor of Massachusetts, was also employed.
Howe married at the age of twenty-one and moved to Boston. It was there that the first germs of his great idea became implanted in his brain. To increase the family income his wife did sewing at night. As Howe watched her slowly and laboriously stitching a seam, his inventive mind sought and sought for some way to decrease her toil. He had a natural bent for mechanics, and it was not long before he had constructed the first crude sewing machine.