Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made

by James Dabney McCabe

CHAPTER XVII.

ELIAS HOWE, JR.

One of the busiest parts of the busy thoroughfare of Broadway, in the city of New York, is the point of its intersection with Fourth Street. Thousands and tens of thousands of people pass and repass there daily, but few ever pause to look at the curious machine which stands in the window of the shop at the north-west corner of these two streets. This machine, clumsy and odd-looking as it is, nevertheless has a history which makes it one of the most interesting of all the sights of the great city. It is the first sewing-machine that was ever made.

Elias Howe, its maker, was born in the town of Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819. He was one of eight children, and it was no small undertaking on the part of his father to provide a maintenance for such a household. Mr. Howe, Sen., was a farmer and miller, and, as was the custom at that time in the country towns of New England, carried on in his family some of those minor branches of industry suited to the capacity of children, with which New England abounds. When Elias was six years old, he was set, with his brothers and sisters, to sticking wire teeth through the leather straps used for making cotton cards. When he became old enough he assisted his father in his saw-mill and grist-mill, and during the winter months picked up a meager education at the district school. He has said that it was the rude and imperfect mills of his father that first turned his attention to machinery. He was not fitted for hard work, however, as he was frail in constitution and incapable of bearing much fatigue. Moreover, he inherited a species of lameness which proved a great obstacle to any undertaking on his part, and gave him no little trouble all through life. At the age of eleven he went to live out on the farm of a neighbor, but the labor proving too severe for him, he returned home and resumed his place in his father's mills, where he remained until he was sixteen years old.

When at this age, he conceived an ardent desire to go to Lowell to seek his fortune. One of his friends had just returned from that place, and had given him such a wonderful description of the city and its huge mills, that he was eager to go there and see the marvel for himself. Obtaining his father's consent, he went to Lowell, and found employment as a learner in one of the large cotton-mills of the city. He remained there two years, when the great financial disaster of 1837 threw him out of employment and compelled him to look for work elsewhere. He obtained a place at Cambridge, in a machine-shop, and was put to work upon the new hemp-carding machinery of Professor Treadwell. His cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, afterward governor of Massachusetts, member of Congress, and major-general, worked in the same shop with him, and boarded at the same house. Howe remained in Cambridge only a few months, however, and was then given a place in the machine-shop of Ari Davis, of Boston.

At the age of twenty-one he married. This was a rash step for him, as his health was very delicate, and his earnings were but nine dollars per week. Three children were born to him in quick succession, and he found it no easy task to provide food, shelter, and clothing for his little family. The light-heartedness for which he had formerly been noted entirely deserted him, and he became sad and melancholy. His health did not improve, and it was with difficulty that he could perform his daily task. His strength was so slight that he would frequently return home from his day's work too much exhausted to eat. He could only go to bed, and in his agony he wished "to lie in bed forever and ever." Still he worked faithfully and conscientiously, for his wife and children were very dear to him; but he did so with a hopelessness which only those who have tasted the depths of poverty can understand.

About this time he heard it said that the great necessity of the age was a machine for doing sewing. The immense amount of fatigue incurred and the delay in hand-sewing were obvious, and it was conceded by all who thought of the matter at all that the man who could invent a machine which would remove these difficulties would make a fortune. Howe's poverty inclined him to listen to these remarks with great interest. No man needed money more than he, and he was confident that his mechanical skill was of an order which made him as competent as any one else to achieve the task proposed. He set to work to accomplish it, and, as he knew well the dangers which surround an inventor, kept his own counsel. At his daily labor, in all his waking hours, and even in his dreams, he brooded over this invention. He spent many a wakeful night in these meditations, and his health was far from being benefited by this severe mental application. Success is not easily won in any great undertaking, and Elias Howe found that he had entered upon a task which required the greatest patience, perseverance, energy, and hopefulness. He watched his wife as she sewed, and his first effort was to devise a machine which should do what she was doing. He made a needle pointed at both ends, with the eye in the middle, that should work up and down through the cloth, and carry the thread through at each thrust; but his elaboration of this conception would not work satisfactorily. It was not until 1844, fully a year after he began the attempt to invent the machine, that he came to the conclusion that the movement of a machine need not of necessity be an imitation of the performance of the hand. It was plain to him that there must be another stitch, and that if he could discover it his difficulties would all be ended. A little later he conceived the idea of using two threads, and forming a stitch by the aid of a shuttle and a curved needle with the eye near the point. This was the triumph of his skill. He had now invented a perfect sewing-machine, and had discovered the essential principles of every subsequent modification of his conception. Satisfied that he had at length solved the problem, he constructed a rough model of his machine of wood and wire, in October, 1844, and operated it to his perfect satisfaction. His invention is thus described:

"He used a needle and a shuttle of novel construction, and combined them with holding surfaces, feed mechanism and other devices, as they had never before been brought together, in one machine One of the principal features of Mr. Howe's invention is the combination of a grooved needle, having an eye near its point, and vibrating in the direction of its length, with a side-pointed shuttle for effecting a locked stitch, and forming, with the threads, one on each side of the cloth, a firm and lasting seam not easily ripped. The main action of the machine consists in the interlocking of the loop, made by the thread carried in the point of the needle through the cloth, with another thread passed through this loop by means of a shuttle entering and leaving it at every stitch. The thread attached to this shuttle remains in the loop and secures the stitch as the needle is withdrawn to be ready to make the next one. At the same time the cloth, held by little projecting pins to the baster plate, is carried along with this by what is called the 'feed motion' just the length of a stitch, the distance being readily adjusted for finer or coarser work. .... The cloth is held in a vertical position in the machine, and the part to be sewed is pressed against the side of the shuttle-race by a presser plate hinged on its upper edge, and capable of exerting any required pressure on the cloth, according as the adjusting screw that regulates it is turned. A slot, or perforation through the plate, also extended through the side of the shuttle-race near the bottom, admits the passage of the needle; and when this is pushed in the shuttle can still pass freely over it. The shuttle is pushed one way and then the other through its race or trough by picker staves. The thread for the needle is supplied by a bobbin, the movement of which is checked by a friction band, this securing the proper tension, and the slack of the thread is duly taken up by a suitable contrivance for the purpose. Thus, all the essential features of the most approved sewing-machine were first found in that of Mr. Howe; and the machines of later date are, in fact, but modifications of it."