Thoughts From Oakdale: 2011

       Well today I would like to share with you is the history of the sewing machine. The following was a report that I did a couple years ago so I hope you enjoy.
        "She makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers sashes to the merchant." Proverbs 31:24, sewing has been around from the beginning of time. Today I am going to tell you about the invention of the sewing machine. You might be thinking that the inventor of the sewing machine is Isaac Singer, but he is not the inventor, although he did contribute a lot to the sewing machine. The inventor is Elias Howe. I am going to tell you about Elias Howe, the history of the sewing machine and the effects the sewing machine had on society.
       Elias Howe was born on July 19, 1819, in Spencer, Massachusetts. When he was a young boy his parents leased him to a neighboring farmer due to financial necessity. When he was 16 years old he left the farm and went to Boston to work for a machinist and earned $9 a week. After working for the machinist for a few years he go married. He was forced to quite work due to chronic illness and his wife was forced to take in sewing to keep the family from starving. After watching his wife toil away at her stitches, Elias Howe was convinced that a sewing machine was needed. So after 14 years, lots of observation and many tries Elias finally made the first working sewing machine. He patented his model on September 10,1846. To get the public interested he had a competition with 5 seamstresses who were known for speed in a public hall. He finished 5 seams at 250 stitches a minute, before any of the seamstresses had finished even one seam. However his machine did not grab the public's attention so he took it to England to see how it would do. Unfortunately, the sewing machine was not very well accepted in England, so he returned to America to find that in his absence the sewing machine had become popular.
   People have been sewing for a very long time. Sewing needles use to be a piece of bone with an eye for the thread, and now is a piece of iron. Here are a few people who worked with the idea of a sewing machine before Elias Howe. One of the first people to try and invent the sewing machine was Thomas Saint. Although he did patent it nobody thought that much about it till later, because it was filed under "wearing apparel". Somebody finally tried his idea, and had to make a lot modifications before it would work. Another person who attempted the sewing machine was Bartholomew Thimonnier. He had learned the tailoring trade and had noticed how short a time it had taken to weave a piece of cloth and how long it took to sew the garment together by hand. He secretly worked on his machine for 4 years, ignoring his shop till his neighbors thought he was crazy. He succeeded in having 80 machines that would work and he used them to make uniforms for the French army. Worried tailors however, could not be quieted and a mob destroyed the machines and Thimonnier died penniless in England. Walter Hunt also worked with the idea of a sewing machine. He was the first to use the lockstitch idea; previous machines had used a chainstitch. But he did not think that his invention was worth much so he sold his idea for a small amount. Elias Howe was the first person to make a working machine using the lockstitch. Elias Howe had taken all the good ideas for a sewing machine and had put them into one machine. He had the only working machine that did not try to copy the human hands. As I said earlier his machine was not popular at first, it was not until he came back from England that it became popular. Isaac Singer is the man who started the Singer Sewing Machine Company. He liked Elias Howe's machine and made many changes to it, making it better. He is responsible for making it popular. Singer got sued by Elias Howe for not getting royalties and lost. Elias Howe got $5 for every machine sold in the U.S. and $1 for every exported machine. He had become a millionaire by the time he died. Singer made his fortune off the sewing machine business. He was a very business-minded person and started a good number of merchandising practices such as, installment buying, advertising campaigns, and the provision of service along with sales. Helen Auguste Blanchard was the inventor of the zigzag sewing machine. Out of her 28 patents 22 of them deal with the sewing machine. The paper pattern was also invented at about the same time, by Ellen Curtis Demorest. She had seen her servant cutting a dress pattern out on wrapping paper. Ellen Demorest thought it was a good idea, so she and her husband figured out a mathematical system to print patterns in a variety of sizes. Unfortunately they forgot to patent it, and Ebenezer Butterick patented it. Ebenezer Butterick is the founder of the Butterick Pattern Company, which is the leading pattern company in the world.
     The sewing machine had both positive and negative effects on society. Some of the positive effects are that it helped women cut back on the amount of time it took them to sew, let's say a man's dress shirt. By hand it took a woman 10 hours to sew a man's dress shirt, but with a sewing machine it took her only 1 hour to sew. This gave her 9 extra hours to do many other things that she was not able to do before, such as play with her children, enjoy some leisure hours, and it gave her more time in her day to work on other household chores. After the sewing machine was invented people realized that if they built a gigantic building, and put rows upon rows of tables, with countless sewing machines on these tables they could then hire people to make clothing to sell. Thus started the mass clothing production era. This had both a good and a bad effect. The good thing that it did was to open up more job opportunities, that way people could make money so that they would not starve, because of the hard times. The bad that it did was that it pulled families apart. When this whole thing started there were no child labor laws, so children would work long, hard hours for very little wages, it also took them out of school.
Thanks!