The Age of Invention [29]
flourishing, and Whitney's gins were cleaning more and more cotton; the sheep of a thousand hills were giving wool; Arkwright's machines in England, introduced by Slater into New England, were spinning the cotton and wool into yarn; Cartwright's looms in England and Lowell's improvements in New England were weaving the yarn into cloth; but as yet no practical machine had been invented to sew the cloth into clothes.
There were in the United States numerous small workshops where a few tailors or seamstresses, gathered under one roof, laboriously sewed garments together, but the great bulk of the work, until the invention of the sewing machine, was done by the wives and daughters of farmers and sailors in the villages around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In these cities the garments were cut and sent out to the dwellings of the poor to be sewn. The wages of the laborers were notoriously inadequate, though probably better than in England. Thomas Hood's ballad The Song of the Shirt, published in 1843, depicts the hardships of the English woman who strove to keep body and soul together by means of the needle:
With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread.
Meanwhile, as Hood wrote and as the whole English people learned by heart his vivid lines, as great ladies wept over them and street singers sang them in the darkest slums of London, a man, hungry and ill-clad, in an attic in faraway Cambridge, Massachusetts, was struggling to put into metal an idea to lighten the toil of those who lived by the needle. His name was Elias Howe and he hailed from Eli Whitney's old home, Worcester County, Massachusetts. There Howe was born in 1819. His father was an unsuccessful farmer, who also had some small mills, but seems to have succeeded in nothing he undertook.
Young Howe led the ordinary life of a New England country boy, going to school in winter and working about the farm until the age of sixteen, handling tools every day, like any farmer's boy of the time. Hearing of high wages and interesting work in Lowell, that growing town on the Merrimac, he went there in 1835 and found employment; but two years later, when the panic of 1837 came on, he left Lowell and went to work in a machine shop in Cambridge. It is said that, for a time, he occupied a room with his cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, who rose from bobbin boy in a cotton mill to Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and Major-General in the Civil War.
Next we hear of Howe in Boston, working in the shop of Ari Davis, an eccentric maker and repairer of fine machinery. Here the young mechanic heard of the desirability of a sewing machine and began to puzzle over the problem. Many an inventor before him had attempted to make sewing machines and some had just fallen short of success. Thomas Saint, an Englishman, had patented one fifty years earlier; and about this very time a Frenchman named Thimmonier was working eighty sewing machines making army uniforms, when needle workers of Paris, fearing that the bread was to be taken from them, broke into his workroom and destroyed the machines. Thimmonier tried again, but his machine never came into general use. Several patents had been issued on sewing machines in the United States, but without any practical result. An inventor named Walter Hunt had discovered the principle of the lock-stitch and had built a machine but had wearied of his work and abandoned his invention, just as success was in sight. But Howe knew nothing of any of these inventors. There is no evidence that he had ever seen the work of another.
The idea obsessed him to such an extent that he could do no other work, and yet he must live. By this time he was married and had children, and his wages were only nine dollars a week. Just then an old schoolmate, George Fisher, agreed to support his family and furnish him with five hundred dollars for materials and tools. The attic in Fisher's house in Cambridge was Howe's workroom. His first efforts were failures, but all
There were in the United States numerous small workshops where a few tailors or seamstresses, gathered under one roof, laboriously sewed garments together, but the great bulk of the work, until the invention of the sewing machine, was done by the wives and daughters of farmers and sailors in the villages around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In these cities the garments were cut and sent out to the dwellings of the poor to be sewn. The wages of the laborers were notoriously inadequate, though probably better than in England. Thomas Hood's ballad The Song of the Shirt, published in 1843, depicts the hardships of the English woman who strove to keep body and soul together by means of the needle:
With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread.
Meanwhile, as Hood wrote and as the whole English people learned by heart his vivid lines, as great ladies wept over them and street singers sang them in the darkest slums of London, a man, hungry and ill-clad, in an attic in faraway Cambridge, Massachusetts, was struggling to put into metal an idea to lighten the toil of those who lived by the needle. His name was Elias Howe and he hailed from Eli Whitney's old home, Worcester County, Massachusetts. There Howe was born in 1819. His father was an unsuccessful farmer, who also had some small mills, but seems to have succeeded in nothing he undertook.
Young Howe led the ordinary life of a New England country boy, going to school in winter and working about the farm until the age of sixteen, handling tools every day, like any farmer's boy of the time. Hearing of high wages and interesting work in Lowell, that growing town on the Merrimac, he went there in 1835 and found employment; but two years later, when the panic of 1837 came on, he left Lowell and went to work in a machine shop in Cambridge. It is said that, for a time, he occupied a room with his cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, who rose from bobbin boy in a cotton mill to Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and Major-General in the Civil War.
Next we hear of Howe in Boston, working in the shop of Ari Davis, an eccentric maker and repairer of fine machinery. Here the young mechanic heard of the desirability of a sewing machine and began to puzzle over the problem. Many an inventor before him had attempted to make sewing machines and some had just fallen short of success. Thomas Saint, an Englishman, had patented one fifty years earlier; and about this very time a Frenchman named Thimmonier was working eighty sewing machines making army uniforms, when needle workers of Paris, fearing that the bread was to be taken from them, broke into his workroom and destroyed the machines. Thimmonier tried again, but his machine never came into general use. Several patents had been issued on sewing machines in the United States, but without any practical result. An inventor named Walter Hunt had discovered the principle of the lock-stitch and had built a machine but had wearied of his work and abandoned his invention, just as success was in sight. But Howe knew nothing of any of these inventors. There is no evidence that he had ever seen the work of another.
The idea obsessed him to such an extent that he could do no other work, and yet he must live. By this time he was married and had children, and his wages were only nine dollars a week. Just then an old schoolmate, George Fisher, agreed to support his family and furnish him with five hundred dollars for materials and tools. The attic in Fisher's house in Cambridge was Howe's workroom. His first efforts were failures, but all