Open your closet.
Take out any article of clothing.
A shirt. A coat. A pair of trousers. A pair of boxer-shorts, a blouse, a waistcoat, a T-shirt, a singlet, a glove…anything!
Now take out a magnifying glass and count every single stitch on the garment you’ve selected.
Imagine for a minute that you had to remake this garment. By hand. And that every single one of those dozens…hundreds…thousands of stitches…all had to be done, painstakingly, by you. One at a time.
Even working as fast as you could, as neatly as you could, it would be an exhausting, eye-bending, finger-numbing process to even make a simple shirt, taking countless hours and days and weeks.
But imagine that there was a machine that could do this for you. Something that could make dozens of stitches, hundreds of stitches every minute. Every single one the same, every single one identical, every single one just as strong and as permanent and as unmovable as the one that preceded it.
Now wouldn’t that be nice?
This is the story of the remarkable machine that singlehandedly changed the clothing industry forever. It is called the sewing-machine.
Who Invented the First Machine?
The sewing-machine was first conceived in 1790. It was the brainchild of English cabinetmaker, Thomas Saint. It was a heavy-duty thing used to sew together leather and canvas, but it was a sewing-machine. No actual Saint-style sewing-machines survive (if indeed one ever made it off the drawing-board). It wasn’t until nearly 100 years later, in 1874, that another sewing-machine manufacturer (a man named William Newton Wilson), discovered Saint’s original schematic drawings, hidden away somewhere in the London Patent Office. Out of curiosity, Wilson copied Saint’s diagrams and built a working replica of Saint’s 1790 machine.
It’s still around today. You can see it at the London Science Museum. Here’s a photo of a copy of that reproduction, in a museum in Japan:
The world’s first sewing machine! This model of a Saint sewing machine sits in the Sewing Machine Museum, in Nagoya, Japan.
Developing the Machine
Over the next few decades, the sewing machine was altered, improved and updated by a successive number of inventors and mechanics. Much like with the weaving machines of the 1700s, the sewing machines of the 1800s were met with considerable…
…anger.
See, because sewing took SUCH a long time, if you did it by hand, tailors could make a lot of money, since not everybody could do the precise, time-consuming, eye-straining work that they did every single day.
But if you had a machine that could do this, suddenly, their edge was gone!
Terrified that they’d be out of business, French tailors went on a riot! A French tailor named Thimonnier patented a new kind of sewing-machine in the early 1830s. Was it a success?
Hardly.
His brethren were so enraged that he’d developed a machine to take over their prized and highly specialised craft that they went on the rampage! Thimonnier’s machine-factory was ransacked! The machines were smashed to pieces and the entire factory was destroyed! By the early 1840s, it was all over.
So much for the French attempts at a sewing machine.
The next player in this game was an American. Walter Hunt.
Hunt was an inventor. And a big one. Here’s a list…
– Sewing-machine
– Safety-pin
– Repeating rifle
– Knife-sharpener
– Streetcar bells
– Coal-fired stoves
– Street-sweepers
– Ice-and-snow ploughs
– The velocipede
For those people scratching their heads right about now, the velocipede was an early type of bicycle.
Hunt’s machine was interesting, but hardly practical. Due to a design-fault, the machine was more of a hindrance than a help. The feed-dogs didn’t work very well, and this held the machine up.
The feed-dogs are little teethed pieces of metal underneath the needle-plate. The needle-plate is the plate of steel directly underneath the needle. As the machine runs, the feed-dogs rub back and forth and their ribbed surfaces push the fabric along, tugging it between the needle-plate, and the foot-plate (the metal clamp that snaps down on top to hold the fabric in place to stop it sliding around). Ideally, the dogs would move back and forth ‘feeding’ fresh fabric under the needle (and between the needle-plate and foot-plate), while also passing the finished fabric out the other side of the machine.
Ingenious!
But Hunt’s machine didn’t have dogs that worked properly. Instead of the machine pushing the fabric through at a regular pace, the sewer had to do it instead. And this was slow, tricky, imprecise and very frustrating. For all of Hunt’s inventions, his sewing-machine was a failure.
The next man to come along was Elias Howe.
Howe’s entry into the sewing-machine was pretty interesting. Like everyone else, he was trying to figure out how to make a better, smoother machine with stronger, more permanent stitches that didn’t come apart so easily.
To achieve this, Elias Howe invented something that every single machine has today.
A needle with its eye (hole) near the tip of the needle, instead of near the head (which is where the eye usually is, for hand-sewing needles).
Legend has it that Howe came to this realization after a nightmare. During the 1840s, while he was turning his sewing-machine idea over in his head, he had a horrifying dream. He’d been kidnapped by savage natives who were planning to kill him. They’d harpoon him to death with their spears!
Spears with…holes in the spearheads…
When Howe woke up, he suddenly realised that a needle with a hole in its tip would feed the thread headfirst into the fabric, instead of having the thread trail into the fabric after the needle. This would make the whole process faster and neater. And it allowed him to create the lockstitch sewing machine.
The lockstitch is the basic sewing-machine stitch. It happens when the thread fed down from the needle intertwines (locks) with the thread fed to the fabric from the bobbin, underneath the machine. The result is a tight, unbreakable stitch formed from two lengths of thread…something that would have been impossible without Howe’s eye-point needle.
Howe’s luck didn’t last long, though.
The moment this new revelation went public, everyone started copying him! Howe had long and frustrating court-battles to protect his invention, and he did eventually win, forcing his competitors to pay him royalties everytime they built a machine that utilised his new needle. They couldn’t get around it because a machine needed his needle to work properly. So there was at least a certain level of happiness to the end of this story.
One of the men that Howe dragged, kicking and screaming to the courthouse was the son of a German millwright. A man named Isaac…Merritt…Singer.
Singer Sewing Machines
Every industry has one leader or one brand which is instantly identifiable.
Rolex makes watches. Mercedes makes cars. Harley Davidson makes motorcycles. Steinway makes pianos.
Singer makes sewing-machines.
Although, what the connection between sewing and pizza happens to be, I’m not quite sure…
For over 160 years, Singer has been considered the first name in quality sewing-machines. Ask your mother. Grandmother. Aunt. Most likely, they own, or know, or knew, someone who did own, or does own…a Singer. And it’s not a sewing-machine…it’s a Singer. ‘Sewing machine’ is a mean, base word, offensive to the ears. ‘Singer’ is a sign of quality, craftsmanship, durability and style.
So where did it start?
Singer, the name known the world-over for its top-quality sewing-machines, was established in 1851 by Isaac Merritt Singer, the guy who Elias Howe dragged to court for stealing his special needle.
With the aid of New York lawyer Edward Clark (1811-1882), the company was established as I.M. Singer & Co. In 1865, when the American Civil War ended, the company changed to the Singer Manufacturing Company. Most vintage Singers will have “SIMANCO” stamped onto their various components. It stands for the SInger MANufacturing COmpany. Now you know.
Singer machines were stupendously popular. In 1853, the company sold just 810 machines. By 1876, they had sold 262,316! And climbing!
Singer machines were popular because they were stylish, simple, well-built, easy to care for and solid as Gibraltar. Even today, Singer machines that are 60, 70, 90, 100, 120, 140 years old…still work perfectly…for the pure fact that no corners were cut and everything was machined to perfection.
Like a lot of companies, Singer stopped manufacturing its breadwinning products during the Second World War. Instead, they built military hardware. They tried manufacturing automatic pistols (five hundred all told), but the results were hardly spectacular, and five hundred were all that were ever made. Today, those five hundred Singer sidearms are pretty rare…and valuable!
Singers were made all over the world. Not just in America, but also in Russia and the United Kingdom, and exported to every corner of the globe.
Singers were popular because of their wide range, good designs and their easy operation and maintenance. They built everything from huge desktop treadle-powered, belt-driven machines that were as big as desks, and which could sit in a standard parlour or living-room in a middle-class residence, to small, portable, hand-cranked machines, like this one:
Something small like this could be carried onboard a ship and placed on a table. The hand-crank meant that there was no electricity required to run it. Just muscles – handy in parts of the world which didn’t have electrical grids. Hand-cranked Singers were made well into the 1930s, even as electrical models were starting to come out in the ’20s.
Singers were famous for their jet-black bodies with their fancy goldwork and patterns around the wheels, machine-beds, sides and tops, a distinctive style that lasted for over a hundred years.
Designed to be as portable and as self-sufficient as possible, Singers came with all kinds of nifty attachments and features, as did some other machine-makers of the day. Underneath the machine-bed was a storage-compartment. Here you could put extra thread, needles, chalk, spare keys and any other necessities that you needed. The machine-manual, attachments, accessories, repair-tools and equipment were also stored in these little hidden compartments. The famous curved ‘bentwood’ cases that covered the tops of most (but not all) Singers came with brackets and hooks inside them, to safely store things like knee-bars, cans of machine-oil and so-forth, to stop them rattling around and damaging the machine. It was expected that no matter where you were, you could operate, clean and repair your machine, no matter what happened.
The sewing machine has come a long way from the Georgian one-time experiment to the robber of tailor’s livelihoods, to becoming the cornerstone of the clothing industry. This is just a brief look at the history of a truly marvelous machine that made countless lives easier around the world.
Looking for more Information?
www.oldsingersewingmachines.com
www.sewalot.com
www.singer.com
Dedication
This posting is affectionately dedicated to my beloved, late and much-missed grandmother (7th May, 1914 – 28th Nov., 2011). A professional tailor and seamstress of nearly fifty years’ experience, she fixed all my clothes when I was a child. She passed away at the impressive age of 97. It was her machine which was the inspiration for this article.
My grandmother’s sewing-machine, a Singer model 99k, made in 1950, in Kilbowie, Scotland