THE SEWING MACHINE.
EMBROIDERING MACHINE, THE FORERUNNER OF THE SEWING MACHINE--SEWING
MACHINE OF THOMAS SAINT--THE THIMONNIER WOODEN MACHINE--GREENOUGH’S
DOUBLE POINTED NEEDLE--BEAN’S STATIONARY NEEDLE--THE HOWE SEWING
MACHINE--BACHELDER’S CONTINUOUS FEED--IMPROVEMENTS OF SINGER--
WILSON’S ROTARY HOOK AND FOUR-MOTION FEED--THE MCKAY SHOE SEWING
MACHINE--BUTTONHOLE MACHINES--CARPET SEWING MACHINE--STATISTICS.
“With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread--
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the ‘Song of the Shirt.’”
In 1844 Thomas Hood wrote and published his famous “Song of the Shirt,”
in which the drudgery of the needle is portrayed with pathetic fidelity.
It is not to be supposed that any relation of cause and effect exists
between the events, but it is nevertheless a singular fact that about
this time Howe commenced work on his great invention, which was patented
in 1846, and was the prototype of the modern sewing machine. If the
sewing machine had appeared a few years earlier, the “Song of the Shirt”
would doubtless never have been written.
From the time of Mother Eve, who crudely stitched together her fig
leaves, sewing seems to have been set apart as an occupation peculiarly
belonging to women, and it may be that this was the reason why in the
history of mechanical progress the sewing machine was so late appearing,
for women are not, as a rule, inventors, and none of the sewing machines
were invented by women.
In all the preceding centuries of civilization hand sewing was
exclusively employed, and it was reserved for the Nineteenth Century to
relieve women from the drudgery which for so many centuries had enslaved
them.
Embroidery machines had been patented in England by Weisenthal in 1755,
and Alsop in 1770, and on July 17, 1790, an English patent, No. 1,764,
was granted to Thomas Saint for a crude form of sewing machine, having a
horizontal arm and vertical needle. In 1826 a patent was granted in the
United States to one Lye for a sewing machine, but no records of the
same remain, as all were burned in the fire of 1836. In 1830 B.
Thimonnier patented a sewing machine in France, 80 of which, made of
wood, were in use in 1841 for sewing army clothing, but they were
destroyed by a mob, as many other labor-saving inventions had been
before. Between 1832 and 1835 Walter Hunt, of New York, made a
lock-stitch sewing machine, but abandoned it. On Feb. 21, 1842, U. S.
Pat. No. 2,466 was granted to J. J. Greenough for a sewing machine
having a double pointed needle with an eye in the middle, which needle
was drawn through the work by pairs of traveling pincers. It was
designed for sewing leather, and an awl pierced the hole in advance of
the needle. On March 4, 1843, U. S. Pat. No. 2,982 was granted to B. W.
Bean for a sewing machine in which the needle was stationary, and the
cloth was gathered in crimps or folds and forced over the stationary
needle. In 1844, British Pat. No. 10,424 was granted to Fisher and
Gibbons for working ornamental designs by machinery, in which two
threads were looped together, one passing through the fabric, and the
other looping with it on the surface without passing through.
The great epoch of the sewing machine, however, begins with Elias Howe
and the sewing machine patented by him Sept. 10, 1846, No. 4,750. Almost
everyone is familiar with the modern Howe sewing machine, and it will be
therefore more interesting to present the form in which it originally
appeared. This is shown in Fig. 144. A curved eye-pointed needle was
carried at the end of a pendent vibrating lever, which had a motion
simulating that of a pick-ax in the hands of a workman. The needle took
its thread from a spool situated above the lever, and the tension on the
thread was produced by a spring brake whose semicircular end bore upon
the spool, the pressure being regulated by a vertical thumb screw. The
work was held in a vertical plane by means of a horizontal row of pins
projecting from the edge of a thin metal “baster plate,” to which an
intermittent motion was given by the teeth of a pinion. Above, and to
one side of the “baster plate” was the shuttle race, through which the
shuttle carrying the second thread was driven by two strikers, which
were operated by two arms and cams located on the horizontal main shaft.
As will be seen, this machine bears but little resemblance to any of the
modern machines, but it embodied the three essential features which
characterize most all practical machines, viz.: a grooved needle with
the eye at the point, a shuttle operating on the opposite side of the
cloth from the needle to form a lock stitch, and an automatic feed.
[Illustration: FIG. 144.--HOWE’S SEWING MACHINE, 1846.]
Howe first commenced his work on the sewing machine in 1844, and
although he had made a rough model of that date, he was too poor to
follow it up with more practical results until a former schoolmate,
George Fisher, provided $500 to build a machine and support his family
while it was being constructed, in consideration of which Mr. Fisher was
to receive a half interest in the invention. In April, 1845, the machine
was completed, and in July he sewed two suits of clothes on it, one for
Mr. Fisher and the other for himself. Notwithstanding the success of
his machine, which on public exhibition beat five of the swiftest hand
sewers, he met only discouragement and disappointment. He, however,
built a second machine, which was the basis of his patent, and is the
one shown in the illustration. After obtaining his United States patent
Howe went to England with the hope of introducing his machine there,
but, failing, he returned to America, some years later, only to find
that his invention had been taken up by infringers, and that sewing
machines embodying his invention were being built and sold. These
infringers sought to break his patent by endeavoring to prove, but
without success, that Howe’s invention was anticipated by the abandoned
experiments of Walter Hunt in 1834. Howe won his suit, and the
infringers were obliged to pay him royalties, which, for a time,
amounted to $25 on each machine. Howe then bought the outstanding
interest in his patent, established a factory in New York, and from the
profits of his manufacture, and the royalties, he soon reaped a princely
fortune of several million dollars. In six years his royalties had grown
from $300 to $200,000 a year, and in 1863 his royalties were estimated
at $4,000 a day.
A patent that occupied an important place in sewing machine feeds was
that granted to Bachelder May 8, 1849, No. 6,439, in which a spiked and
endless belt passed horizontally around two pulleys. This patent
contained the first continuous feed, and it was re-issued and extended,
and ran with dominating claims on the continuous feed, until 1877.
[Illustration: FIG. 145.--WILSON SEWING MACHINE, 1852.]
In connection with the development of the sewing machine the name of A.
B. Wilson stands next in rank to that of Howe. Wilson invented the
rotary hook carrying a bobbin, which took the place of the reciprocating
shuttle. This was patented by him June 15, 1852, No. 9,041, and is shown
in Fig. 145. He also invented the far more important improvement of the
four-motion feed, which is a characteristic feature of nearly all
practical family sewing machines. This four-motion feed was pooled in
the early sewing machine combination with the Bachelder and other
patents, and earned for its promotors a far greater pecuniary return
than the original Howe sewing machine itself. Estimates place this
profit high in the millions. The four-motion feed was patented December
19, 1854, No. 12,116, and it is a comparatively simple affair. Divested
of its operating mechanism, it consists simply of a little metal bar
serrated with forwardly projecting saw teeth on its upper surface, to
which bar, by means of an operating cam, a motion in four directions in
the path of a rectangle is given. The serrated bar first rises through a
slot in the table, then moves horizontally to advance the cloth, then
drops below the table, and finally moves back again horizontally below
the table to its starting point.
Upon these two important features--the rotating hook patented by Wilson
in 1852, and the four-motion feed, patented in 1854--a large and
important business was built. In this business Mr. Nathaniel Wheeler was
associated with Mr. Wilson, and the well-known Wheeler & Wilson machines
are the result of their enterprise and ingenuity.
[Illustration: FIG. 146.--ORIGINAL SINGER SEWING MACHINE.]
Contemporaneous with the Wheeler & Wilson machine were other excellent
machines, among which may be mentioned the Singer machine, patented Aug.
12, 1851, No. 8,294, by Isaac M. Singer, the original model of which is
shown in Fig. 146. The Singer machine met the demands of the tailoring
and leather industries for a heavier and more powerful machine. A
characteristic feature was the vertical standard with horizontal arm
above the work table, which was afterwards adopted in many other
machines. Singer was the first to apply the treadle to the sewing
machine for actuating it by foot power in the place of the hand-driven
crank wheel. In 1851 W. O. Grover and W. E. Baker patented a machine
which made the double chain stitch, characteristic of the Grover & Baker
machine. James E. A. Gibbs invented and covered in several patents from
1856 to 1860 the single-thread rotating hook, which was embodied in the
Wilcox & Gibbs machine. In addition to these, the “Weed” machine, made
under Fairfield’s patents; the “Domestic” machine, made under Mack’s
patents; and the “Florence” machine, made under Langdon’s patents, were
other representative machines, which, in a few years after Howe’s
patent, helped to revolutionize the art of tailoring, introduced the
great era of ready-made clothing and ready-made shoes, emancipated women
from the drudgery of the needle, and increased the efficiency of one
pair of hands fully ten fold.
In 1856 the owners of the original sewing machine patents formed the
famous “sewing machine combination,” for the establishment of a common
license fee, and for the protection of their mutual interests. The
combination included Elias Howe, the Wheeler & Wilson Manufacturing
Company, the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company, and I. M. Singer &
Co. The following summary of machines made by the leading companies from
1853 to 1876 illustrates the early growth of this industry:
Manufacturer. 1853. 1859. 1867. 1871. 1873. 1876.
Wheeler & Wilson
Manufacturing Co. 799 21,306 38,055 128,526 119,190 108,997
The Singer
Manufacturing Company 810 10,953 43,053 181,260 232,444 262,316
Grover & Baker Sewing
Machine Co. 657 10,280 32,999 50,838 36,179 ....
Howe Sewing Machine
Company .... .... 11,053 134,010 90,000 109,294
Wilcox & Gibbs
Sewing Machine Co. .... .... 14,152 30,127 15,881 12,758
Domestic Sewing
Machine Company .... .... .... 10,397 40,114 23,587
From the foregoing table it will be seen that as far back as a quarter
of a century ago the output of machines was over a half a million a
year. By 1877 all of the fundamental patents on the sewing machine had
expired, but the continued activity of inventors in this field is
attested by the fact that to-day there are many thousands of patents
relating to the sewing machine and its parts. Besides those relating to
the organization of the machine itself there is an endless variety of
attachments, such as hemmers, tuckers, fellers, quilters, binders,
gatherers and rufflers, embroiderers, corders and button hole
attachments. Every part of the machine has also received separate
attention and separate patents, all tending to the perfection of the
machine, until to-day, with all fundamental principles public property,
and endless improvements in details, it is difficult to discriminate as
to comparative excellence.
There is to-day a great variety of sewing machines on the market,
standard machines for ordinary work, and special machines for numerous
special applications. It is said that one concern alone manufactures
over four hundred different varieties of sewing machines.
One of the most important and revolutionary of the applications of the
sewing machine is for making shoes. Prior to 1861 shoemaking was
confined to the slow, laborious hand methods of the shoemaker. Cheap
shoes could only be made by roughly fastening the soles to the uppers by
wooden pegs, whose row of projecting points within has made many a man
and boy do unnecessary penance. Hand sewed shoes cost from $8 to $12 a
pair, and were too expensive a luxury for any but the rich. With the
McKay shoe sewing machine in 1861, however, comfortable shoes were made,
with the soles strongly and substantially sewed to the uppers, at a less
price even than the coarse and clumsy pegged variety. The McKay machine
was the result of more than three years patient study and work. It was
covered by United States patents No. 35,105, April 29, 1862; No. 35,165,
May 6, 1862; No. 36,163, Aug. 12, 1862; and No. 45,422, Dec. 13, 1864,
and its development cost $130,000 before practical results were
obtained. A modern form of it is shown in Fig. 147. In preparing a shoe
for the machine, an inner sole is placed on the last, the upper is then
lasted and its edges secured to the inner sole. An outer sole, channeled
to receive the stitches, is then tacked on so that the edges of the
upper are caught and retained between the two soles. The shoe is then
placed on the end of a rotary support called a horn, which holds it up
to the needle. A spool containing thread coated with shoemakers’ wax is
carried by the horn, and the thread, with its wax kept soft by a lamp,
runs up the inside of the horn to the whirl. The latter is a small ring
placed at the upper end of the horn, and through which there is an
opening for the passage of the needle. The needle has a barb, or hook,
and as it descends through the sole the whirl lays the thread in this
hook, and as the needle rises it draws the thread through the soles and
forms a chain stitch in the external channel of the outer sole. As the
sewing proceeds, the horn is rotated so as to bring every part of the
margin of the sole under the needle. With this machine a single operator
has been able to sew nine hundred pairs of shoes in a day of ten hours,
and five hundred to six hundred pairs is only an average workman’s
output. It is said that up to 1877 there were 350,000,000 pairs of shoes
made on this machine in the United States, and probably an equal or
greater number in Europe. Shoes made on this machine were strongly made
and comfortable, but they could not be resoled by a shoemaker, except by
pegging or nailing, and the soles were furthermore somewhat stiff and
lacking in flexibility. To meet these difficulties, a new machine known
as the “Goodyear Welt Machine,” was patented in 1871 and 1875, and
brought out a little later. This sewed a welt to an upper, which welt in
a subsequent operation was sewed by an external row of stitches to the
sole. This gave much greater flexibility, and the further advantage of
enabling a shoemaker to half sole the shoe by the old method of hand
sewing. This advanced the art of shoemaking in the finer varieties of
shoes, and to-day nearly all men’s fine shoes are made in this way. The
introduction of the sewing machine into the shoe industry made a new era
in foot wear, and it is said that no nation on earth is so well and
cheaply shod as the people of the United States.
[Illustration: FIG. 147.--MCKAY SHOE SEWING MACHINE.]
A buttonhole does not strike the average person as a thing of any
importance whatever. The needlewoman, however, who has to patiently
stitch around and form the buttonholes, knows differently, and when this
needlewoman, working in the great shirt factories and shoe factories, is
confronted with the many millions of buttonholes in collars, cuffs,
shirts and shoes, the great amount of this painstaking and nerve
destroying labor becomes appalling. For cheapening the cost of
buttonholes, and reducing the hand labor, various buttonhole machines
and attachments to sewing machines have been devised. Patents Nos.
36,616 and 36,617, to Humphrey, Oct. 7, 1862, covered one of the
earliest forms, but the Reece buttonhole machine, which is specially
devised for the work, is one of the most modern and successful. It was
patented April 26, 1881, Sept. 21, 1886, and Aug. 20, 1895. These
machines mark an important departure, which consists in working the
buttonhole by moving the stitch forming mechanism about the buttonhole,
instead of moving the fabric. An illustration of the machine is given in
Fig. 148. Upon this machine 10,010 button holes have been made in nine
hours and fifty minutes. The machine first cuts the buttonhole, then
transfers it to the stitching devices, which stitch and bar the
buttonhole, finishing it entirely in an automatic manner. The saving
involved to the manufacturer by this machine over the hand method is
several hundred per cent., but the relief to the needlewoman is of far
greater consequence.
[Illustration: FIG. 148.--REECE BUTTONHOLE MACHINE.]
Many striking applications of the sewing machine to various kinds of
work have been made. A recent one is the automatic power carpet sewing
machine, made and sold by the Singer Manufacturing Company. It was
patented by E. B. Allen in 1894. This machine in general appearance
resembles a miniature elevated railroad. It consists of an elevated
track about thirty-six feet long, sustained every three or four feet
upon standards, and having clamping jaws, which hold together the upper
edges of the two lengths of carpet to be sewed together. A compact
little stitching apparatus, not larger than a tea-pot, is actuated by an
endless belt from an electric motor at one end. The little machine runs
along and stitches together the upper edges of the suspended carpet
lengths, and as it crawls along at its work, it strikingly reminds one
of the movements of a squirrel along the top of a rail fence. This
machine will sew five yards of seam every minute, fastening together
evenly and strongly ten yards of carpet, and entirely dispensing with
all hand labor in this roughest and most trying of all fabrics.
Probably no organized piece of machinery has ever been so systematically
exploited, so thoroughly advertised, so persistently canvassed, and so
extensively sold as the sewing machine. With their main central offices,
their branch offices, sub-agencies and traveling canvassers in wagons,
every city, village, hamlet, and farmhouse has been actively besieged,
and with the enticing system of payment by instalments there is scarcely
a home too humble to be without its sewing machine. The retail price of
sewing machines bears no proper relation to their cost, but this price
to the consumer results from the liberal commissions to agents, and the
expensive methods of canvassing. In the early days of the sewing machine
its sales were chiefly for family use, but this is now no longer the
case. While almost every family owns a sewing machine, it is only
brought into requisition for finer and special varieties of work, since
nearly all the clothing of men, women and children can now be purchased
ready made, at a price much less than the cost of the material and the
labor of making it up. A man to-day buys a ready-made shirt for fifty
cents, which fifty years ago would have cost him $2. This has largely
transferred the sphere of action of the sewing machine from the family
to the factory. Great factories now make ready-made clothing for men,
women and children, shirts, collars and cuffs, shoes, hats, caps,
awnings, tents, sails, bags, flags, banners, corsets, gloves,
pocketbooks, harness, saddlery, rubber goods, etc., and all these
industries are founded upon the sewing machine, which may be seen in
long rows beside the factory walls, busily supplying the demand of the
world. With this transition in the sewing machine foot treadles are no
longer relied on, but the machines are run by power from countershafts.
This, in turn, has opened up possibilities of much higher speed and
greater efficiency in the machine. Inventors have found, however, that
high speed is handicapped with certain limitations. Beyond a certain
speed the needle gets hot from friction, which burns off the thread and
draws the temper. Cams and springs, moreover, are not positive enough in
action, as the resilience of the spring does not act quickly enough, and
so more positive gearings, such as eccentrics and cranks, must be
employed. Despite these difficulties, however, the modern factory
machine has raised the speed of the old-time sewing machine from a few
hundred stitches a minute to three and four thousand stitches a minute.
The United States is the home of the sewing machine, and New York City
is the center of the industry, probably 90 per cent. of the sewing
machine trade being managed and handled there. German manufacturers are
making great efforts to compete in this field, but American machines are
generally regarded as the best in the world.
Among those prominently interested in the machine in its early days were
Orlando B. Potter and the law firm of Jordan & Clarke. The latter were
attorneys representing some of the prominent inventors in litigation,
and in this way Mr. Edward Clarke became interested in the business, and
it was he who in 1856 instituted the system of selling on the instalment
plan. For some years before his death Mr. Clarke was the president of
the Singer Company.
Recent statistics in relation to the sewing machine industry are
difficult to obtain, partly by reason of the great extent and
ramifications of the business, and partly by reason of the unwillingness
of the larger companies to give out data for publication. At the Patent
Centennial in Washington, in 1891, Ex-Commissioner of Patents
Butterworth made the statement that “Cæsar conquered Gaul with a force
numerically less than was employed in inventing and perfecting the parts
of the sewing machine.” The great Singer Company, with headquarters at
New York, operates not only a factory at Elizabethport, N. J., employing
5,000 men, but also other factories in Europe and Canada, the one at
Kilbowie, Scotland, employing 6,000 men. Of the total of 13,500,000
machines made by this company from 1853 to the end of 1896, nearly
6,000,000 have been made in factories located abroad, but directly
controlled and managed by the New York office. It is stated that the
present output of the American factory of the Singer Company amounts to
over 11,000 weekly, or more than half a million annually. Although so
many sewing machines are made abroad, the exports from the United States
for 1899 amounted to $3,264,344.
In the early days of the Howe sewing machine it was denounced as a
menace to the occupations of the thousands of men and women who worked
in the clothing shops, and the struggles of the inventor against this
opposition and discouragement form an interesting page of history. But
it had come to stay and to grow. Some 7,000 United States patents attest
the interest and ingenuity in this field, in the neighborhood of 100,000
persons make a living from the manufacture and sale of the machine,
millions find profitable employment in its use, and from 700,000 to
800,000 machines are annually manufactured in the United States. The
output of all countries is estimated to be from 1,200,000 to 1,300,000
annually.
The sewing machine has for its objective result only the simple and
insignificant function of fastening one piece of fabric to another, but
its influence upon civilization in ministering to the wants of the race
has been so great as to cause it to be numbered with the epoch-making
inventions of the age. It has created new industries. It has given
useful employment to capital, has extended the lists of the wage earner,
and increased his daily pay. It has clothed the naked, fed the hungry,
and warded off the ravages of cold and death; but, best of all its
tuneful accompaniment has lightened the heart and smoothed the pathway
of life for Hood’s weary working woman, to whose tired fingers and
aching eyes it has brought the balm of much-needed rest.