=140. A Time-Saving Invention.= Elias Howe was a poor boy who won great
riches through his invention, but spent most of his years in a long,
dreary struggle with poverty.
[Illustration: ELIAS HOWE]
Elias was born in Massachusetts in 1819. His father was a poor man. He
worked in his father's mill and then in the cotton mills of New England
until he came to have a thorough knowledge of machinery. When he was
twenty-four he began his great invention, the sewing machine.
Sewing machines using a chain stitch had already been invented in
England and France, but a chain stitch ravels easily. Howe invented
a lock stitch machine. Like earlier machines, it had a needle with an
eye in its point to bring a loop of thread through the cloth. In chain
stitching the needle at the next stitch passes through this loop. Howe
instead passed a shuttle carrying a second thread through the loop.
This made a firm lock stitch.
[Illustration: HOWE'S FIRST SEWING MACHINE]
Howe tried to get tailors to buy his machine. He proved that it would
sew seven times as fast as the best needleworkers. But they were afraid
it would take work away from their men, and would have nothing to do
with it.
After patenting his machine, Howe took it to England, but there he
remained as poor and unknown as before.
Returning to New York he heard that unscrupulous men had stolen or
"pirated" his ideas, and that the sale of sewing machines was now a
thriving business. But Howe was determined to uphold his rights. In
1859, after a battle of many years in the law courts, he secured the
full and complete title to his invention.
=141. A Turn in Fortune.= The man who had faced poverty and rebuffs
all his days now came into great wealth. His income each year would be
equal to-day to at least a million dollars.
Sewing machines have now become almost a necessity in all American
homes. It is hard to realize the amount of close, slow, exacting work
from which Howe's machine has released women everywhere. The work of
the most skillful needlewomen is not to be compared in speed and
evenness with machine stitching. Garments now can be produced in vastly
greater quantities than by hand work, and machine stitching is much
more durable.
When the Civil War came, Howe's sewing machine made tents, shoes, and
uniforms for the great Union army which would not have had them in time
otherwise. Howe himself enlisted as a private and served while his
health lasted. He died in 1867 when only forty-eight years old.