[CHAPTER XIX.]
GARMENTS.
“Man is a tool-using animal. Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.... Man is a tool-using animal, of which truth, clothes are but one example.”—Sartor Resartus.
In looking through the records of man’s achievements to find the beginnings of inventions, we discover the glimmering of a change in the form of the immemorial needle, in an English patent granted to Charles F. Weisenthal, June 24, 1775. It was a needle with a centrally located eye, and with both ends pointed, designed for embroidery work by hand, and the object of the two points was to prevent the turning of the needle end for end after its passage through the cloth. But it was not until the 19th century that the idea was reduced to practice in sewing machines.
To Thomas Saint, a cabinet maker by trade, of Greenhills Rents, in the Parish of St. Sepulchre, Middlesex County, England, the world is indebted for the first clear conception of a sewing machine. Saint’s attention was attracted to the slow way of sewing boots and shoes and other leather work, so he determined to improve the method. He took out a patent September 17, 1790, and although the germs of some of the leading parts of the modern sewing machine are there described, it does not appear that his patent was applied to practice. In fact, it slumbered in the archives of the British patent office for two generations, and after the leading sewing machines of the century had been invented and introduced, before it was rediscovered, and its contents appreciated in the light of more recent developments. Probably Saint’s machine, if constructed in accordance with his plans, would not have done much good work, certainly not with woven cloth, as he proposed to employ a hooked needle to carry a loop through the material, which would have been snarled by the cloth threads; but from his drawings and description it is clearly established that he was first to conceive of a vertically reciprocating needle for forming a seam from a continuous thread drawn from a spool; a seam in which each loop is locked, or enchained with a subsequent loop, to form what is known as the chain, or single thread stitch; and a horizontal sliding plate, to support the material to be sewed, and by which the material was also moved sideways after each stitch.
May 30, 1804, John Duncan received an English patent for “tamboring on cloth.” He proposed to employ a series of hooked needles attached in a straight line to a horizontal bar, which, when threaded, were first thrust forward and their hooked ends carried through the cloth, where each needle hook was supplied with a thread by a thread carrier. Then the motion of the bar was reversed, which drew the thread back through the cloth in the form of loops, and through the loops first formed, thus producing a chain stitch. The cloth was automatically shifted to correspond to the pattern to be produced, and thus was chain stitch embroidery first manufactured. From this point of time successful embroidery machines were made.
In 1807 another Englishman patented a machine for making a sort of rope matting, in which he describes two eye-pointed, thread-carrying, perforating needles, each held in a reciprocating needle bar, and designed to unite several small ropes laid parallel, by a reciprocating movement.
A German publication, the Kunst and Generbe Blatt, for 1817, and Karmarsch’s History of Technology, made mention of a sewing machine invented by one Mr. Joseph Madersperger of Vienna, formerly from Kuefstein in the Tyrol, and for which he received royal letters patent in 1814. From these descriptions it appears Madersperger used a needle pointed at both ends, and the eye in the centre, invented many years before by Weisenthal, as above stated, which was moved vertically up and down, piercing alternately the top and bottom of the stuff, and which carried a short thread, enough to make about one hundred and thirty stitches, which machine was driven by a crank and handle, on which sewing was made of many different shaped forms, by slight changes, and which sewed with far greater accuracy and rapidity than hand work. The inventor was striving to simplify the machine, but to what extent it had been used or had been improved, or what finally became of it, does not appear. Yet it is a bit of evidence showing that Germany came next to England in the earlier ideas, conceptions of, and struggles after a sewing machine.
France then entered the list, and it was in 1830 that Barthelmy Thimonnier there produced and patented a sewing machine, which he continued to improve and to further patent in 1848 and in 1850 in France, England, and the United States. The Thimonnier resembled in some prominent respects the machine that had been described in the Saint patent, but unlike Saint’s, it was reduced to successful practice, and possessed some points in common with more modern machines. These were the flat cloth plate, vertical post, overhung arm, vertically reciprocating needle, and continuous thread. The crochet or barbed needle was worked by a treadle, and upon pushing the needle down through the cloth, it there caught a thread from a carrier, carried the loop to and laid it upon the upper surface of the cloth. Again descending, it brought up another loop, enchained it with the one last made, making a chain stitch, consisting of a series of loops on the upper side.