settlement of the far western country made Chicago even more central
than it had been before. But, although the advertisements of the
McCormick reaper were scattered everywhere, many farmers would put off
buying until the harvesting season had almost come, and when it was
too late to get the machines from the central factory. Therefore
McCormick had agents and built warehouses in every farming district,
and these agents were given a free rein in their own locality, their
instructions being to see that every farmer who needed a reaper was
given the easiest opportunity to get one. The price was a fixed one,
but McCormick was patient with the purchasers. He gave them a chance
to pay for the reapers with the proceeds of their harvests. He held
that it was better that he should wait for the money than that the
farmers should lack the machines that would enable them to make the
most of their fields of grain. “I have never yet sued a farmer for the
price of a reaper,” he stated in 1848, and he held to that policy as
steadfastly as he could. As a result he soon gained the farmers’
confidence, and his name became identified with square, and even with
lenient, dealing with all classes of purchasers. He lost little by it,
and in the long run the wide-spread advertising of this policy of
business proved an invaluable asset.
It is not to be supposed that no rival reapers were put upon the
market. Many were, and to meet some of these McCormick made use of
what became known as the Field Test. He would instruct his agents to
issue invitations to his rivals to meet him in competition. Then the
different makes of reapers would show how many acres of grain they
could cut in an afternoon before an audience of the neighboring
farmers. Judges were appointed to decide as to the merits of the
different machines, and in most of the tests McCormick’s reaper
outdistanced all its rivals. In one such meeting it is said that forty
machines competed. Such shows were the best possible form of
advertising, but in time they degenerated into absurd performances.
Trick machines of unwieldy strength were built secretly, and reapers
were driven into growths of young trees, and were fastened together
and then pulled apart to prove which was the stronger. At last it was
realized that the field tests were no longer fair, and McCormick gave
them up.
So important an invention as the reaper was certain to have many
improvements made to it. For a number of years, however, the only
additions that were made to the original model were seats for the
driver and raker. The machine did the work of the original man with
the sickle or scythe and that of the cradler, and having cut the grain
left it in loose piles on the ground. But it still had to be raked up
and bound, and a number of inventors were busy trying to perfect
mechanical devices that would do this work too. A man named Jearum
Atkins invented a contrivance that was called the “Iron Man,” which
was a post fastened to the reaper, having two iron arms that swept
round and round and brushed the grain from the platform as fast as it
was cut and had fallen. This plan was very clumsy, but improvements
were made so rapidly that by 1860 the market was filled with various
patterns of self-raking reapers.
The problem of binding the grain was more difficult. This had always
been hard labor, taking a great deal of time and requiring three or
four men to every reaper. The first step toward a self-binder was the
addition of a foot-board at the back of the reaper, on which a man
might stand and fasten the grain into sheaves as it fell. This was a
little better than the old method, but only a little. It took less
time, but it was still very hard and slow work.
McCormick was deep in a study of this matter when one day a man named
James Withington came to him from Wisconsin, and announced that he had
a machine that could automatically bind grain. McCormick had been
working night and day over his own plan, and when the inventor began
to explain he fell asleep. When he woke, Withington had left.
McCormick at once sent one of his men to the inventor’s Wisconsin
home, and, with many apologies, begged him to come back. Withington
did, and showed McCormick a wonderful machine, one made of two arms of
steel that would catch each bundle of grain, pass a wire about it and
twist the ends of the wire, cut it loose, and throw it to the ground.
Here was an invention that would more than double the usefulness of
the reaper, and one that seems quite as remarkable as the reaper
itself. McCormick at once contracted with Withington for this binder,
and tried it on an Illinois farm the following July. It worked
perfectly, cutting fifty acres of grain and binding it into sheaves.
At last only one person was needed to harvest the wheat, the one who
sat upon the driver’s seat and simply had to guide the horses. A
small boy or girl could do all the work that it had taken a score of
men to accomplish twenty years before.
Now it seemed as if the reaper was complete, and nothing could be
added to increase its efficiency. McCormick had seen to it that the
whirr of his machine was heard in every wheat field of the United
States, and was busily extending the reign of the reaper to the great
grain districts of Russia, India, and South America. Then, in the
spring of 1880, William Deering built and sold 3,000 self-binding
machines that used twine instead of wire to fasten the sheaves, and as
the news of this novelty spread the farmers declared that the wire of
the old binders had cut their hands, had torn their wheat, had proved
hard to manage in the flour-mills, and that henceforth they must have
twine-binders.
McCormick realized that he must give the farmers what they demanded,
and he looked about for a man who could invent a new method of binding
with twine. He found him in Marquis L. Gorham, who perfected a new
twine-binder, and added a device by which all the sheaves bound were
turned out in uniform size. By the next year McCormick was pushing his
Gorham binder on the market, and the farmers who had wavered in their
allegience to his reaper were returning to the McCormick fold.
The battle of rival reapers had been long and costly. From the
building of his factory in Chicago McCormick had been engaged in
continuous lawsuits with competitors. His original patent had expired
in 1848, and he had used every effort to have it extended. The battle
was fought through the lower courts, through the Supreme Court, and in
Congress. The greatest lawyers of the time were retained on one side
of the reaper struggle or the other. His rivals combined and raised a
great fund to defeat his claims. He spent a fortune, but his patents
were not renewed, and competition was thrown wide open. With the
invention of the twine-binder the patent war burst out afresh, and
again the courts were called upon for decisions between the rivals.
But by now the competition had become so keen and the cost of
manufacturing so heavy that the field dwindled quickly. When the war
over the twine-binder ended there were only twenty-two competing firms
left; before that there had been over a hundred.
The reaper had been primarily necessary in America, because here farm
labor was very scarce, and the wheat fields enormously productive. In
fact the growth of the newly opened Western country must have been
indefinitely retarded if men had had to cut the grain by hand and
harvest it in the primitive manner. The reaper was a very vital factor
in the development of that country, and McCormick deserved the credit
of being one of the greatest profit-builders of the land.
In Europe and Asia labor was plentiful, and the reaper had to win its
way more slowly. McCormick showed his machine at the great
international exhibitions and gradually induced the large landowners
to consider it. Practical demonstration proved its value, and it made
its appearance in the fields of European Russia and Siberia, in
Germany and France and the Slavic countries, in India, Australia, and
the Argentine, and at last wherever wheat was to be cut. It trebled
the output of grain, and the welfare of the people has proven largely
dependent on their food supply. It has been an invention of the
greatest economic value to the world.
XII
HOWE AND THE SEWING-MACHINE
1819-1867
The needs of his times, and of the people among whom he lives, have
often set the inventor’s mind working along the line of his
achievement. It was so with Elias Howe, who built the first
sewing-machine. A hard-working man, and not overstrong, he would
return to his home from the machine-shop where he was employed, and
throw himself on the bed night after night to rest. Each night he
watched his young wife sewing to clothe their three children and add a
little something to the family income. With a strong taste for
mechanics it was natural that he should wonder if there were not some
way of lightening the burden of so much needlework.
He had been brought up in surroundings that naturally impressed him
with the value of looms and new appliances for spinning and weaving.
He understood the various processes of handling wool and cotton,
although his own work lay outside them. His father had been a miller
in the small Massachusetts town of Spencer, where Elias was born in
1819. New England was already building her textile factories, and when
he was only six the boy joined his brothers and sisters at the work of
sticking wire teeth through the straps of leather that were then used
for cotton-cards. What he learned from books he had to pick up during
a few weeks each summer at the district school. His health was
delicate, and he was lame, unfitted to be a farmer, and his best place
seemed to be in his father’s mill. But he was ambitious, and when he
was sixteen, a friend having brought him glowing tales of the great
cotton-mills in the fast-growing city of Lowell, he decided to seek
his fortune there. The panic of 1837 closed the mills, and Howe found
his course deflected to work in a machine-shop in Cambridge. By the
time he came of age he had married and was living in Boston, working
as a mechanic to support his family. Of a speculative turn of mind, he
was constantly suggesting improvements at the shop, and his watching
his wife labor with needle and thread turned his thoughts in the
direction of a machine for sewing.
The idea was not a new one, but the men who had studied it had decided
that there were too many difficulties to overcome. Howe took up the
matter as a pastime, giving his spare moments to it, and talking it
over with his wife in the evenings when he was not too tired.
Naturally enough what he tried to do was to imitate the action of the
hand in sewing. His idea was to make a machine that would thrust a
needle through the cloth and then push it back again, working up and
down. Therefore his first needle was sharp at both ends, and had its
eye in the middle. He decided that he could only use very coarse
thread, as the constant motion would surely snap any fine thread. But
a year’s experimenting convinced him that this simple up-and-down
thrust was too primitive a motion, and that the needle must be made
to form a different sort of stitch. He tried one method after another,
and finally hit upon the idea of making use of two threads, and
forming the stitch by means of a shuttle and a curved needle having
the eye near the point. He made a model, in wood and wire, of this
first sewing-machine, in October, 1844, and found that it would work.
An early account of Howe’s first sewing-machine says, “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.”
Howe had now decided to give all his time to introducing his
sewing-machine. He gave up his position in the machine-shop, and moved
his family to his father’s house in Cambridge. There his father was
employed in cutting palm-leaf for the manufacture of hats. The son had
a lathe put in the garret, and began to make the various parts that
were needed for his sewing-machine. He did any work he could find by
the day to supply his family with food and clothing, but it proved a
very hard battle. His father’s shop burned, and the whole family
seemed on the brink of ruin. The young inventor was in a very
difficult situation. He was confident that he had a machine that
should, if properly handled, bring him in a fortune, but he must have
some money to buy the iron and steel that were essential to its
building, and he must devise a way of interesting some capitalist in
it sufficiently to enable him to put it on the market. Meantime he
must contrive to provide for his family, who were now practically
without shelter.
Fortunately, at this point, a Cambridge dealer in coal and wood, by
the name of Fisher, heard of Howe’s machine, and asked to see it. Howe
jumped at the opportunity, explained its mechanism, and told how he
was situated. Mr. Fisher thought the model had possibilities, and
agreed to provide board for the inventor and his family, to give the
young man a workshop in his own house, and to advance him the sum of
$500, which Howe said was absolutely necessary to pay for the
construction of such a machine as could be shown to the public. For
his assistance Fisher was to receive a half-interest in a patent for
the sewing-machine if Howe could obtain one. This arrangement proved
Howe’s salvation, and in December, 1844, he moved into his new
friend’s house.
He worked all that winter, meeting the many practical difficulties
that arose as he progressed with his machine, and devising solutions
for overcoming each. He worked all day, and many a time long into the
night. His machine progressed so well that by April, 1845, he found
that it would sew a seam four yards long. The machine was entirely
completed by the latter part of May, and its work proved satisfactory
to both partners. Howe sewed the seams of two woolen suits with it,
one for himself, and one for Fisher, and it was declared that the
mechanical sewing was so well done that it promised to outlast the
cloth. There was no longer any doubt that Howe had invented a machine
that would lighten labor to a very great degree.
He took out his first patent on the sewing-machine toward the end of
1845. But when he tried to introduce his invention he met the same
difficulties that had faced all men who tried to supplant hand labor
by any mechanical process. The tailors of Boston to whom he showed it
were willing to admit its efficiency, but told him that he could never
secure its general use, as such a proceeding would ruin their
business. Every one admired the sewing-machine and praised Howe’s
ingenuity, but no one would buy one. The opposition to the completed
machine seemed insuperable, and Fisher, believing it to be so, at
length withdrew from his partnership with Howe. The latter and his
family had to move back again to his father’s house.
To make a living Howe took a position as a locomotive engineer,
leaving his invention unused at home. This work proved too hard, his
health broke down, and he was compelled to give up the position. In
his enforced idleness he began to devise new ways of selling his
machine, and finally decided to send his brother Amasa to England, and
see if he could not interest some one there in the invention. His
brother was willing to do this, and arrived in London, with a
sewing-machine, in October, 1846. He showed it to a man named William
Thomas, who became interested in it, offered $1,250 for it, and
also offered to employ Elias Howe in his business of umbrella and
corset maker.
[Illustration: ELIAS HOWE’S SEWING MACHINE]
Howe decided that this position was preferable to his idleness in
Cambridge, and accepted it. He sailed for England, and entered the
factory of William Thomas. But, although Thomas had taken a very
lively interest in Howe’s sewing-machine, he did not treat the
inventor well. For eight months Howe worked for him, and meantime he
had sent for his wife and three children, and they had arrived in
London. But eight months was the limit of his endurance of his new
master’s tyranny, and at the end of that time he gave up his position.
Matters seemed tending worse and worse with him, and the situation of
the Howe family in London, almost penniless, grew daily more and more
precarious.
His family at home sent Howe a little money before his earnings were
entirely spent, and he used this to buy passage for his wife and
children back to the United States. He himself stayed in London,
believing there were better chances for the sale of his machine there
than in America. But his pursuit of fortune in England proved but the
search for the rainbow’s pot of gold. There was no market for his
wares, and after months of actual destitution he pawned the model of
his sewing-machine and even his patent papers in order to secure funds
to pay his passage home. Tragedy dogged his footsteps. He reached New
York with only a few small coins in his pocket, and received word that
his wife was lying desperately ill in Cambridge. His own strength was
spent, and he had to wait several days before he had the money to pay
his railroad fare to Boston. Soon after he reached home his wife
died. Blow after blow had fallen on him until he was almost crushed.
Even his hard-won invention seemed now about to be snatched from him.
Certain mechanics in New England, who had heard descriptions of his
model, built machines on its lines, and sold them. The newspapers
learned of these, and began to suggest their use in a number of
industries. Howe looked about him, saw the sewing-machine growing in
favor, heard it praised, and realized that it had been actually stolen
from him. He bestirred himself, found patent attorneys who were
willing to look into his patents, and when they pronounced them
unassailable, found money enough to defend them. He began several
suits to establish his claims in August, 1850, and at about the same
time formed a partnership with a New Yorker named Bliss, who agreed to
try to sell the machines if Howe would open a shop and build them in
New York.
Howe’s claims to the invention of the sewing-machine were positively
established by the courts in 1854. The machine was now well known, and
its value as a moneymaker very apparent. But the workers in cheap
clothing shops organized to prevent the introduction of the machines,
claiming that they would destroy their livelihood. Labor leaders took
up the slogan, and led the men and women workers in what were known as
the Sewing-machine Riots. In the few shops where the machines were
actually introduced they were injured or destroyed by the workmen. The
pressure became so great that the larger establishments ceased their
use, and only the small shops, that employed a few workers, were able
to continue using the new machine. In spite of its recognized value it
looked as if the sewing-machine could not prove a financial success,
and when Howe’s partner Bliss died in 1855 the inventor was able to
buy his share in the business from his heirs for a very small sum.
Opposition, even of the most strenuous order, has never been able to
retard for long the use of an invention that simplifies industry. If a
machine is made that will in an hour do the work that formerly
required several days’ hand labor that machine is certain to displace
that hand labor. The workers may protest, but industrial progress
demands the more economic method. So it was with the sewing-machine.
The riots died away, the labor leaders turned to other fields, and one
by one the clothing factories installed the new machines. Howe had the
patience to wait, and in one way and another obtained the sinews of
war to sue the infringers of his patents. The waiting was worth while.
He ultimately forced all other manufacturers of sewing-machines to pay
him for their products. In six years his royalties increased from $300
a year to over $200,000 a year. His machine was shown at the Paris
Exposition of 1867, and was awarded a gold medal, and Howe himself was
given the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor.
The wheel of fortune has turned quickly for many inventors, but
perhaps never more completely than it did for Elias Howe. The man who
had pawned his goods in London, and had reached New York with less
than a dollar in his pocket, had an income of $200,000 a year. He who
had been rebuffed by the tailors of Boston was recognized as one of
the great men of his generation, and one who, instead of taking the
bread from the mouths of poor working men and women, had lightened
their labor a thousandfold. The women, like his own wife, who had
sewed by day and night, were saved their strength and vision, and the
slavery of the clothing factories, notorious in those days, was
inestimably lightened. But it had been a hard fight to make the world
take what it sorely needed.
Howe’s struggle had been so hard that his health was badly broken when
he did succeed. He had several years to enjoy his profits and honors.
He died October 3, 1867, at his home in Brooklyn.
Many inventors have barely escaped with their lives from the fury of
mobs who thought the inventor would take their living from them.
Papin, and Hargreaves, and Arkwright all learned what such resistance
meant. But as one invention has succeeded another people have grown
wiser, and realized that each has conferred a benefit rather than
taken away a right. Howe was one of the last to find the people he
hoped to benefit aligned against him. The world has moved, since
Galileo’s day, and the inventor is now known as the great benefactor.
But Howe’s life was a fight, and his triumph that of one of the great
martyrs of invention.
XIII
BELL AND THE TELEPHONE
1847-
None of the inventions that have resulted from the study of
electricity have been stumbled upon in the dark. Scientists in both
England and America had realized the possibility of the telegraph
before Morse built his first working outfit in his rooms on Washington
Square. Edison took out a patent covering wireless telegraphy before
Marconi gave his name to the new means of communication. Often a man
who has been following one trail through this new field has come upon
another, glanced down it, and decided to go back and explore it more
thoroughly another day. Meantime the trail is run down by a rival. The
prize has gone to that persevering one who has made that trail his
own, and learned its secret while other men were only glancing at it.
Alexander Graham Bell was by no means the first man to realize that
the sound of the human voice could be sent over a wire. He did not
happen to stumble upon this fact. He worked it out bit by bit, from
what other men had already learned concerning electricity, and his
object was to make the telephone of real use to the world. It so
happened that Elisha Gray and Bell each filed a claim upon the
telephone at the Patent Office on the same day, February 14, 1876.
But it was Bell who was able to place the first telephone at the
public’s service.
He came of a family that had long been interested in the study of
speech. His father, his grandfather, his uncle, and two brothers had
all taught elocution in one form or another at the Universities of
Edinburgh, Dublin, and London. His grandfather had worked out a
successful system to correct stammering, his father, widely known as a
splendid elocutionist, had invented a sign-language that he called
“Visible Speech,” which was of help to those learning foreign tongues,
and also a system to enable the deaf to read spoken words by the
movements of the lips. Naturally enough the young inventor started
with a very considerable knowledge of the laws of sound.
Bell was born in Edinburgh March 1, 1847, and educated there and in
London. When he was sixteen family influence was able to get him the
post of teacher of elocution in certain schools, and he spent his
leisure hours studying the science of sound. Soon after he came of age
he met two well-known Englishmen who were experts in his line of
study, Sir Charles Wheatstone and Alexander J. Ellis. Ellis had
translated Helmholtz’s celebrated book on “The Sensations of Tone,”
and was able to show Bell in his own laboratory how the German
scientist had succeeded in keeping tuning-forks in vibration by the
power of electro-magnets, and had blended the tones of several
tuning-forks so as to produce approximately the sound of the human
voice. This idea was new to Bell, and led him to wonder whether it
would not be possible to construct what might be called a musical
telegraph, sending different notes over a wire by electro-magnetism,
using a piano keyboard to give the different notes.