Great Inventions and Discoveries

by Willis Duff Piercy

The tailors of Boston, believing that a sewing machine would destroy their business, waged fierce warfare against it. In the spring of 1846, seeing no prospect of revenue from his invention, Howe took employment as a railroad engineer on one of the roads entering Boston, but this labor proved too hard for him and he soon gave it up. Howe's partner, Fisher, could see no profit in the machine and became wholly discouraged. Howe then determined to try to market his invention in England, and sent a machine to London. An English machinist examined it, approved it, and paid $250 for it, together with the right to use as many others in his own business as he might desire. Howe was afterward of the opinion that the investment of this $250 by the English machinist brought ultimately to that man a profit of one million dollars.

Elias Howe

During all this time Howe was extremely poor. He and his wife and children had gone to England, but on account of poverty he was compelled to send his family back to America. His fourth machine, which he had constructed in England, he was obliged to sell for 5 pounds (about $25), although it was worth ten times as much, in order to procure money enough to pay his return passage to America. He also pawned his first-made machine and his patent on the invention. In April, 1849, he landed at New York with only an English half-crown in his pocket. Procuring employment in a machine-shop, the inventor took up his abode in one of the cheapest emigrant boarding-houses. At this time his wife lay dying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his father had to send him ten dollars to enable him to go to her.

Finally the sewing machine began to succeed commercially. The inventor's long night of discouragement was breaking on a day of assured prosperity. In 1850 Howe was in New York superintending the manufacture of fourteen sewing machines. His office was equipped with a five-dollar desk and two fifty-cent chairs. A few years later he was rich. Isaac Merritt Singer became acquainted with his machine, and submitted to him the sketch of an improved one. It was Singer who first forced the sewing machine upon the attention of the United States. Howe charged that Singer was infringing his patent rights. Litigation ensued. Judge Sprague of Massachusetts decided in favor of Howe. In his opinion he stated that "there is no evidence in this case that leaves a shadow of doubt that, for all the benefit conferred upon the public by the introduction of a sewing machine the public are indebted to Mr. Howe." From this time Howe began to reap the financial reward of his labors. His revenues from the sewing machine amounted ultimately to more than $200,000 a year. He spent vast sums, however, in defending his patent rights, and many others of the "sewing machine kings" were wealthier than he. Howe died at Brooklyn, New York, October 3, 1867.

The sewing machine is used not only for sewing cloth into all kinds of garments, but for making leather into boots, shoes, harness, and other necessary articles of daily life. Great improvements have been made in the sewing machine since its invention, but its essential principles to-day are for the most part those that the inventor discovered and brought into successful operation in his first machine. It is agreed by disinterested and competent persons that "Howe carried the invention of the sewing machine further toward its complete and final utility than any other inventor before him had ever brought a first-rate invention at the first trial."

The Reaper

In the Louvre at Paris is one of the noblest and most famous paintings of modern art, purchased some years ago at a cost of three hundred thousand francs. It is "The Gleaners" from the brush of the French artist Jean François Millet. It pictures three peasant women who have gone out into the fields to glean at the end of the harvest. They are picking up the grain left by the reapers, seeking the little that is left on the ground. In the background are the field, the groups of reapers, the loaded wagons and the horses bringing the garnered sheaves to the rick, the farmer on horseback among his men, and the homestead among the trees. The transparent atmosphere of the summer day, the burning rays of the sun, and the short yellow stubble are all as if they were nature and not art. In the foreground are the three gleaners, "heroic types of labor fulfilling its task until 'the night cometh when no man can work.'"

One of the most beautiful stories of the Bible is the tale of Ruth, the Moabitess, who went out into the fields of Palestine to glean. "And she went, and came, and gleaned in the field after the reapers; and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz, who was of the kindred of Elimilech."