Sewing machines today often work by electricity. But there are over 2,000 different types, with attachments for turning hems, tucking, frilling, piping, darning, and all kinds of decorative stitching. They can stitch leather, quilt bedspreads and sew on buttons. One type of seven-needle machine can sew 20,000 stitches a minute.
The first sewing machines seem to have been invented by a poor French tailor, Barthelemy Thimmonier, in 1830. An angry mob, afraid that the machines would put people out of work, smashed them and almost murdered Thimmonier. However, he preserved and one of his machines was in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. But no one took it seriously.
In America Walter Hunt invented a machine with an eye-pointed needle that carried a loop of thread through the cloth. A shuttle working to and fro under the cloth carried a second thread through the loop, thus locking it.
The principle had now been discovered, but it was left to another American, Issac Merritt Singer (1811-75) to mass-market a machine. A patent for a lockstitch machine had been obtained in 1846 by Elias Howe, of Massachusetts. But Singer and his astute lawyer, Edward Clark, fought the patent and pioneered the selling of his machines by hire-purchase.
The first Singer machine dates from 1851 and was worked by a treadle. The eye-pointed needle was straight, and worked up and down. Singer added a table to hold the cloth, and n endless leather belt and circular feeding bar that allowed continuous sewing.
By 1860 more than 111,000 machines were produced by 74 American companies. Although thousands of patents have been taken out since that date for improvements and attachments, the main principles have not changed.
Mahatma Gandhi learned to use a sewing machine in prison and said: “it is one of the few useful things ever invented.”
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