Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

Seldom have the lives of great inventors presented a more striking example of the vicissitudes, the despair, and the final triumphs of fortune, which are commonly their lot, than is shown in the case of Howe. A machinist with a wife and children to support, his health too feeble to earn hardly a scanty living, he watches his faithful wife ply her constant needle, and wonders why a machine cannot be made to do the work. The idea cannot be put aside, and with such poor aids as he can command he commences his task.

At last, amid the trials of bitter poverty, he brings his invention to that stage in which he induces a friend to advance some money, by the promise of a share in the future patent, and thereby gains a temporary home for his family and a garret for his workshop. Day after day and night after night he labours, and finally, in April, 1845, the rather crude machine is completed, and two woollen suits of clothing are sewed thereon, one for a friend, and one for himself.

Then came the effort to make more machines and place them on the market. People admired the machines as a curiosity, but none were induced to buy them or help him pecuniarily. Finally, in September, 1846, he obtained his patent, but by that time his best friends had become discouraged, and he was compelled to return with his family to his father’s house in Cambridge, Mass. To earn his bread he sought and found employment on a railway locomotive. By some means his brother sold one of his machines to Mr. William Thomas, a corset maker of London, and Howe was induced to go there to make stays, and his machines. He took his wife and children with him. The arrangement made with his employer was not such as to enable him to keep his family there, and he soon sent them home.

Unable to sell his machines, he was soon reduced to want. He pawned his patent and his last machine, and procured money to return to New York, where he arrived penniless in 1849. He then learned that his wife was dying of consumption at Cambridge. He was compelled to wait until money could be sent him to pay his passage home, and reached there just before his wife’s death.

He then learned that during his absence his patent and machine had attracted attention, that others had taken the matter up, added their improvements to his machines, and that many in various places were being made and sold which were infringements of his patent. A great demand for sewing machines had sprung up. He induced friends to again help him. Suits were commenced which, although bitterly fought for six years, were finally successful.

Now fortune turned her smiling face upon him. Medals and diplomas, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and millions of money became his. When the great civil war broke out in 1861, he entered the army as a private soldier, and advanced the money to pay the regiment to which he belonged, when the Government paymaster had been long delayed. His life was saddened by the fact that his wife had not lived to share his fortune. He died in Brooklyn, New York, October 3, 1867, in the midst of life, riches, and honour, at the comparatively early age of forty-eight.

In referring to the early inventors of sewing machines in America who entered the field about the same time with Howe, mention should be made of J. J. Greenough and George Corliss, who had machines patented respectively in 1842 and 1843, for sewing leather, with double pointed needles; and the running stitch sewing machine used for basting, made and patented by B. W. Bean in 1843. About this time, both in England and America, machines had been devised for sewing lengths of calico and other cloths together, previous to bleaching, dyeing or printing. The edges of the cloths were first crimped or fluted and then sewed by a running stitch.

The decade of 1849-1859, immediately following the development of the Howe machine, was the greatest in the century for producing those successful sewing machines which were the foundation of the art, established a new industrial epoch, and converted Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” into a lament commemorative of the miseries of a slavish but dying industry.

It was during that decade that, in the United States, Batcheller invented the perpetual feed for moving the cloth horizontally under and past the needle. In Howe’s the cloth could be sewed but a certain distance at a time, and then the machine must be readjusted for a new length. Then Blodgett and Lerow imparted to the eye-pointed needle what is called the “dip motion,”—the needle being made to descend completely through the material, then to rise a little to form a loop; the shuttle then entered the loop, the needle descended again a short distance, while the shuttle passed through the loop of the needle thread, and then the needle was raised above the cloth.

It was then that Allen B. Wilson invented the still more famous “four-motion feed” for feeding the cloth forward. He employed a bar having saw like teeth on one edge which projected up through a slotted plate and engaged the cloth. He then first moved the bar forward carrying the cloth; second, dropped the bar; third, moved it back under the plate; and fourth, raised it to its first position to again engage the cloth. These motions were so timed with the movement of the needle and so quickly done that the cloth was carried forward while the needle was raised, the passage and quick action of the needle was not interfered with, and the feeding and the sewing seem to be simultaneous. The intermittent grasp and feed of the cloth were hardly perceptible, and yet it permitted the cloth to be turned to make a curved seam. Wilson also invented the rotating hook which catches the loop of the upper thread, and drops a disk bobbin through it to form the stitch. The shuttle was thus dispensed with, and an entirely new departure was made in the art. These with other improvements made up the celebrated “Wheeler and Wilson” machine.