SOME MACHINES
THE SEWING MACHINE
Civilization owes the invention of the sewing machine to Elias Howe,
an American. Howe was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, July 9, 1819.
His father was a miller, and work in the mills gave the son's mind a
bent toward machinery. One day in 1839 while Howe was working in a
machine-shop in Boston, he overheard a conversation among some men
regarding the invention of a knitting machine. "What are you bothering
yourselves with a knitting machine for? Why don't you make a sewing
machine?" asked one. "I wish I could," was the reply, "but it can't be
done." "Oh, yes it can," said the first, "I can make a sewing machine
myself." "Well, you do it," replied the second, "and I'll insure you
an independent fortune."
This conversation impressed Howe with the idea of producing a sewing
machine. The hope of relieving his extreme poverty set him to work on
the invention in earnest in the year 1843. George Fisher, a coal and
wood dealer of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was a former schoolmate of
Howe, formed a partnership with him for producing the invention. In
December, 1844, Howe moved into Fisher's house, set up his shop in the
garret, and went to work. In the following April he sewed the first
seam with his new machine, and by the middle of May he had sewed all
the seams of two suits of clothes, one for himself and one for his
partner.
On September 10, 1846, a patent on the sewing machine was issued to
Howe from the United States Patent Office at Washington.
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.
[Illustration: 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 Francois 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."
According to the old English law, gleaners had the right to go into the
fields and glean. And those needy ones who went for the leavings of the
reapers could not be sued for trespass.
But it is not with reaping in art, literature, or law that we are here
concerned, but with the reaper as a machine, a concrete thing, a tool,
an instrument of civilization.
From the earliest times until nearly the middle of the last century
the cutting of grain was done by means of a hand sickle or curved
reaping-hook. The sickles used by the ancient Jews, Egyptians, and
Chinese differed very little from those of our own ancestors. This tool
was only slightly improved as the centuries went by, and to this day
the sickle may be seen in use. In many parts of the British Isles the
reaping-hook gave place to the scythe in the earlier part of the
nineteenth century. An attempt to trace the idea of a machine for
reaping would carry us far back into the early stages of agriculture;
Pliny, the Roman writer, born early in the first century of the
Christian era, found a crude kind of reaper in the fields of Gaul. For
the great modern invention of the reaping machine, civilization is
indebted to Cyrus Hall McCormick, an American.
McCormick was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, February 15, 1809.
His father, Robert McCormick, a farmer of inventive mind, worked long
to produce a reaper. In 1831 he put a reaping machine in the field for
trial, but it failed to work and its inventor was completely
discouraged. Against the counsel of his father, Cyrus McCormick began a
study of the machine that had failed, to determine and to overcome the
causes of failure. He produced another reaper, and in the late harvest
of 1831 he tested it in the wheat fields of his father's farm and in
some fields of oats belonging to a neighbor. The machine was a success.
McCormick's invention, soon destined to revolutionize agriculture, was
combated for the alleged reason that it would destroy the occupation of
farm laborers during the harvest season. It was some years before
McCormick himself realized the importance of his invention, and he did
not take out a patent on it until June 21, 1834. It was not until 1840
that he began manufacturing reapers for the market. In that year he
constructed one and sold it to a neighbor. For the harvest of 1843 he
made and sold twenty-nine machines. These had all been built upon the
home farm by hand, the workmen being himself, his father, and his
brothers. In 1844 he traveled with his reaper from Virginia to New York
State, and from there through the wheat fields of Wisconsin, Illinois,
Ohio, and Missouri, showing the machine at work in the grain and
enlisting the interest of agricultural men.
[Illustration: A MODERN REAPER This machine cuts, threshes, winnows,
and sacks the wheat]
In 1847 and 1848 Chicago was but a trading village. McCormick,
foreseeing its future growth, located his reaper factory there. In that
factory he constructed about nine hundred reapers for the harvest of
1848.
In 1851 he exhibited his invention at the World's Fair in London. The
London _Times_ facetiously called it "a cross between a wheel-barrow
and a flying machine." Later the same paper said of the reaper that it
was "the most valuable contribution to the Exposition, and worth to
the farmers of England more than the entire cost of the Exposition."
In 1848 McCormick's patent on the reaper expired. Although his claim as
the inventor was clearly established, and the commissioner of patents
paid him the highest compliments in words for his invention, a renewal
of the patent was denied. Other reapers had been made in the meantime,
and others have been brought out subsequently. It is an historical
fact, however, and one now seldom questioned, that every harvesting
machine which has ever been constructed is in its essential parts the
invention of Cyrus Hall McCormick.
Besides being a great inventor and successful business man, McCormick
was a liberal philanthropist. He gave freely to educational and
religious institutions. He died at his home in Chicago, May 13, 1884.
An improved type of the ordinary reaper of McCormick is the
self-binder, now in common use, a machine which not only reaps the
stalks of grain but binds them together in sheaves.
The most primitive method of threshing grain from the straw was
doubtless by beating it with a stick. The ancient Egyptians and
Israelites spread out their loosened sheaves upon a circular plot of
earth and threshed out the grain by driving oxen back and forth over
it. Later a threshing-sledge was dragged over the sheaves. The Greeks
and the Romans beat out grain with a stick, trod it out with men or
horses, or used the threshing-sledge. The primitive implement for
threshing in northern Europe was the stick. A modification of this was
the flail, made of two sticks loosely fastened together at one end by
means of stout thongs. This implement was used by our ancestors in
America and has not yet entirely disappeared from all parts of the
world. The threshing machine was invented in 1787 by Andrew Meikle, a
Scotchman. Only a few years ago threshing machines were drawn by
horses, but of late years they have been moved with self-propelling
steam engines, commonly called traction engines.
A remarkable combination machine has come into use recently,
particularly in the vast wheat fields of California, eastern
Washington, and the West. This machine is drawn by as many as
thirty-two horses. At one operation it cuts the grain, threshes it,
winnows it, and puts it into bags ready for the market.
SPINNING AND WEAVING MACHINES
The low, monotonous hum of the spinning-wheel in the old farmhouse on
winter evenings, as the housewife spun the yarn which she was afterward
to knit into warm stockings for the family, has not entirely passed
away from the memory of the older generation of to-day. Thomas Buchanan
Read has a pathetic allusion to the old spinning-wheel in one of his
best poems, "The Closing Scene." And who has not felt the charm of the
spinning-wheel scene in Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish,"
which pictures John Alden as he sits clumsily holding on his hands the
skein which Priscilla winds for knitting.
There are two essential principles in the art of spinning: first, the
drawing out of uniform quantities of fiber in a continuous manner; and
second, the twisting of the fiber so as to give it coherency and
strength. The earliest spinning apparatus, and for ages the only one,
was the distaff and spindle. The former was a staff upon which was
loosely bound a bundle of the fiber to be spun. It was held in the left
hand or was fastened in the belt. The spindle, a tapering rod smaller
than the distaff, was held in the right hand. The rotation of the
spindle gave the necessary twist to the thread, and around the spindle
the thread was wound as it was twisted. The next development in
spinning machinery was the spinning-wheel, which has continued in use
in some rural parts of the world practically to the present day.
The series of inventions that overthrew hand spinning, and made this
industry possible on a large scale, really began in 1738 when Lewis
Paul, an English inventor, discovered a process for drawing out and
attenuating threads of wool or cotton by passing the fiber through
successive pairs of rollers. To-day this principle forms a fundamental
feature of all spinning machinery. In 1764 James Hargreaves, an
illiterate weaver and carpenter of Lancashire, England, invented the
spinning-jenny, a device by which eight threads could be spun at once.
With a little improvement in this invention, eighty threads were
produced as easily as eight. The idea of the spinning-jenny is said to
have been accidentally suggested to its inventor by watching the
motions of a common spinning-wheel which one of his children had
unintentionally upset.
Hargreaves is another in the long list of those who have suffered
persecution because of having done something to make the world better.
His fellow-spinners, filled with prejudice toward his invention because
they feared it might rob them of employment, broke into his house and
destroyed his machine. He then moved to Nottingham, where he erected a
spinning mill. In 1770 Hargreaves took out a patent on his invention,
but the patent was subsequently annulled on the ground that he had sold
a few machines before patenting the invention.
Valuable as was the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, it was adapted only
to producing the transverse threads, or the woof. It could not produce
sufficient firmness and hardness for the longitudinal threads, or the
warp. In 1767 Richard Arkwright, another native of Lancashire, invented
the spinning-frame, which was able to yield a thread fine enough and
firm enough to make the warp. At the time of his invention Arkwright
was so poor that he had to be furnished with a suit of clothes before
he looked respectable enough to appear at an election. Like Hargreaves,
he also was persecuted. Both were driven out of Lancashire to
Nottingham to escape popular rage. Arkwright's patent was annulled, and
at one time his factory was destroyed by the populace in the presence
of a powerful military and police force, who did nothing to restrain
it. And why were Hargreaves and Arkwright driven out of Lancashire?
They had invented machines that would produce more and cheaper
clothing; that would give powerful impetus to the cotton and the woolen
industries; that would lift the race higher in the path-way of
civilization. What was the reason? Misunderstanding, prejudice, and
selfishness. The interests of the few were shutting out the interests
of the world. And these interests of the few were imaginary.
In spite of all opposition, however, Arkwright succeeded, and may be
regarded as the founder of the modern factory system.
In 1779 Samuel Crompton, another Lancashire inventor, produced an
improved spinning machine called the spinning-mule. This invention
combined the good qualities of the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves and the
spinning-frame of Arkwright. Its chief point of excellence lay in the
fineness of the threads which it spun; from this kind of thread could
be made finer fabrics than were possible with the machines of
Hargreaves and of Arkwright.
Crompton was very poor. By day he worked at the loom or on the farm to
earn bread for himself, his mother, and his two sisters, and at night
he toiled away on his invention. No sooner had he perfected his machine
than he was beset by persons seeking to rob him of its benefits. All
kinds of devices were employed for learning the secret. Ladders were
placed against his windows in order that unscrupulous spectators might
get a view of the machine. He did not dare to leave the house, lest his
secret be stolen from him. He had spent his last farthing upon the
invention and had no funds for securing a patent. A manufacturer
persuaded him to disclose to the trade the nature of his invention
under promise of a liberal subscription; but Crompton received only a
paltry sum amounting to less than $350. He finally saved up enough
money to begin manufacturing on a small scale, but his rivals had
already out-distanced him. He died in June, 1827, disspirited at the
ill treatment he had received, but not until he had seen his invention
a powerful agency in British cloth manufacturing.
An interesting glimpse of the days when weaving was done by hand in
England may be found in the first chapter of George Eliot's _Silas
Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe_. The hand-loom in weaving was
superseded by the power-loom early in the nineteenth century. The loom
was the invention of the Rev. Edmund Cartwright, an English clergyman,
poet, and inventor. The date of the invention was 1785. Cartwright's
first loom was very crude, but he subsequently improved it. The idea
for the invention of his power-loom came to Cartwright after a visit
to the spinning mills of Arkwright. He too was subjected to opposition
from the weavers on account of his invention. At one time he was
associated with Robert Fulton in his experiments in applying steam to
navigation.