Inventors

by Philip Gengembre Hubert

It is not therefore surprising that the greatest labor-saving machine of domestic life, the sewing-machine, should have been received with anything but thanks. Howe was abused, ridiculed, and denounced as the enemy of man, and especially of poor sewing-women, the very class whose toil he has done so much to lighten. Curses instead of blessings were showered upon him during the first years that followed the successful working of his wonderful machine. Fortunately for the inventor, the age of persecution had almost passed, and Howe lived to receive the rewards he so fully deserved.

Elias Howe, Jr., was born in Spencer, Mass., in 1819. His father was a farmer and miller, and the eight children of the family, as was common with all poor people of the time, were early taught to do light work of one kind or another. When Elias was six years old he was set with his brothers and sisters at sticking wire teeth through the leather straps used for cotton-cards. When older he helped his father in the mill, and in summer picked up a little book knowledge at the district school. As a boy he was frail in constitution, and he was slightly lame. When eleven years old he attempted farm labor for a neighbor, but, was not strong enough for it and returned to his father's mill, where he remained until he was sixteen. It was here that he first began to like machinery. A friend who had visited Lowell gave him such an account of that bustling city and its big mills that young Howe, becoming dissatisfied, obtained his father's consent to leave, and found employment in one of the Lowell cotton-mills. The financial crash of 1837 stopped the looms, and Howe obtained a place in a Cambridge machine-shop in which his cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, afterward Governor of Massachusetts, also worked. Howe's first job happened to be upon a new hemp-carding machine of Treadwell.

At the age of twenty-one Howe married and moved to Boston, finding employment in the machine-shop of Ari Davis. He is described as being a capital workman, more full of resources than of plodding industry, however, and rather apt to spend more time in suggesting a better way of doing a job than in following instructions. With such a disposition, and inasmuch as his suggestions were not considered of value, he had rather a hard time of it. Three children were born to the young couple. As Howe's earnings were slight and his health none of the best, his wife tried to add to the family income, and at evening, when Howe lay exhausted upon the bed after his day's work, the young mother patiently sewed. Her toil was to some purpose. With his natural bent for mechanics, Howe could not be a silent witness of this incessant and poorly paid labor without becoming interested in affording aid. Moreover, he was constantly employed upon new spinning and weaving machines for doing work that for thousands of years had been done painfully and slowly by hand. The possibility of sewing by machinery had often been spoken of before that day, but the problem seemed to present insuperable difficulties.

Elias Howe had, as we know, peculiar fitness for such work. He had seen much of inventors and inventions, and knew something of the dangers and disappointments in store for him. In the intervals between important jobs at the shop he nursed the idea of a sewing-machine, keeping his own counsel. In his first rude attempt it appeared to him, that machine-sewing could only be accomplished with very coarse thread or string; fine thread would not stand the strain. For his first machine he made a needle pointed at both ends, with an eye in the middle; it was arranged to work up and down, carrying the thread through at each thrust. It was only after more than a year's work upon this device that he decided it would not do. This first attempt was a sort of imitation of sewing by hand, the machine following more or less the movements of the hand. Finally, after repeated failures, it became plain to him that something radically different was needed, and that there must be another stitch, and perhaps another needle or half a dozen needles, in such a machine. He then conceived the idea of using two threads, and making the stitch by means of a shuttle and a curved needle with the eye near the point. This was the real solution of the problem. In October, 1844, he made a rough model of his first sewing-machine, all of wood and wire, and found that it would actually sew.

In one of the earliest accounts of the invention it 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."

Meanwhile Howe had given up work as a machinist and had moved to his father's house in Cambridge, where the elder Howe had a shop for the cutting of palm-leaf used in the manufacture of hats. Here Elias and his little family lived, and in the garret the inventor put up a lathe upon which he made the parts of his sewing-machine. To provide for his family he did such odd jobs as he could find; but it was hard work to get bread, to say nothing of butter, and to make matters worse his father lost his shop by fire. Elias knew that his sewing-machine would work, but he had no money wherewith to buy the materials for a machine of steel and iron, and without such a machine he could not hope to interest capital in it. He needed at least $500 with which to prove the value of his great invention.

Fortune threw in his way a coal and wood dealer of Cambridge, named Fisher, who had some money. Fisher liked the invention and agreed to board Howe and his family, to give Howe a workshop in his house, and to advance the $500 necessary for the construction of a first machine. In return he was to become a half owner in the patent should Howe succeed in obtaining one. In December, 1844, Howe accordingly moved into Fisher's house, and here the new marvel was brought into the world. All that winter Howe worked over his device in Fisher's garret, making many changes as unforeseen difficulties arose. He worked all day, and sometimes nearly all night, succeeding by April, 1845, in sewing a seam four yards long with his machine. By the middle of May the machine was completed, and in July Howe sewed with it the seams of two woollen suits, one for himself and the other for Fisher; the sewing was so well done that it promised to outlast the cloth. For many years this machine was exhibited in a shop in New York. It showed how completely, at really the first attempt, Howe had mastered the enormous difficulties in his way. Its chief features are those upon which were founded all the sewing-machines that followed.

Late in 1845 Howe obtained his first patent and began to take means to introduce his sewing-machine to the public. He first offered it to the tailors of Boston, who admitted its usefulness, but assured him that it would never be adopted, as it would ruin their trade. Other efforts were equally unsuccessful; the more perfectly the machine did its work, the more obstinate and determined seemed to be the resistance to it. Everyone admitted and praised the ingenuity of the invention, but no one would invest a dollar in it. Fisher became disheartened and withdrew from the partnership, and Howe and his family moved back into his father's house.

For a time the poor inventor abandoned his machine and obtained a place as engineer on a railway, driving a locomotive, until his health entirely broke down. Forced to turn again to his beloved sewing-machine for want of anything better to do, Howe decided to send his brother Amasa to England with a machine. Amasa reached London in October, 1846, and met a certain William Thomas, to whom he explained the invention. Thomas was much impressed with its possibilities and offered $1,250 for the machine and also to engage Elias Howe at $15 a week if he would enter his business of umbrella and corset maker. This was at least a livelihood to the latter, and he sailed for England, where for the next eight months he worked for Thomas, whom he found an uncommonly hard master. He was indeed so harshly treated that, although his wife and three children had arrived in London, he threw up his situation. For a time his condition was a piteous one. He was in a strange country, without friends or money. For days at a time the little family were without more than crusts to live upon.