CHAPTER XV.

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