Isaac Merrit Singer

While his name is most strongly associated with the sewing machine, Isaac Singer's life is a tale far beyond the story of mechanized stitching. A philanderer and cut throat businessman, Singer managed to accrue huge sums of wealth in his later life.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Trac B. Wilson. So you
probably know the name Isaac Singer because the Singer name
is still emblazoned on sewing machines available to all of

(00:24):
us today. But there is so much more to his
life story than that particular innovation. Uh. We mentioned when
we did our episode several years ago on the patent
Wars around the Sewing Machine that his life story was
sort of fascinating and merited its own episode, and he's
finally getting it. But I will tell you upfront he's

(00:46):
not really a heroic figure, although he has like a
hard scrabble start and you really want to root for him.
He also was a big fan of kind of shady
business dealings. He had a very violent temper, and there
are a whole lot of women and children in this story.
Singer was born on Octo eighteen eleven in Pittstown, New York.

(01:08):
His father, Adam Singer, was a German immigrant from Saxony.
The name Singer is shortened from the family named Rice Singer.
The change Adam made after arriving in the United States,
Adam and his wife, American born Ruth Benson, had seven
other children in addition to Isaac, and not long after
Isaac was born, the family moved to the township of

(01:28):
Granby and the relatively unpopulated Oswego County, and the family
was not wealthy. Adam Singer had worked as a millwright,
which was a job that required both technological skill and
some know how an ingenuity, but it was really an
underpaid field prior to unionization. But then when they moved

(01:49):
away from Pittstown and to Granby, that wasn't really a
job that was available. They were basically homesteaders by this point,
trying to tamy land that really was largely still wilderness.
As a side note, as we Go was in the
midst of an area that was really considered a theater
in the War of eighteen twelve. Although the residents of
that area seemed to have pretty much been onlookers rather

(02:10):
than active participants. They were not really strongly affected by
the war, even though it was part of the war. Theater. Yeah,
it was happening around them, but it seemed like it
didn't There were so few of them. For one thing
that it wasn't like, and the town was attacked because
there weren't really towns. It was very scattered, so Isaac,

(02:32):
for his part, had only a very basic education at
this point. The school where he learned was new um
It had been built by collecting money from families of
the area, and there's some suggestion from his own recollections
and interviews that he gave later in his life that
his father actually kept him away from school, and the
family home was generally characterized as pretty tumultuous. Adam and

(02:55):
Ruth did divorce in eight one, and as part of
coverture laws of the time him a woman lost all
claim to any property of their husbands if they petitioned
for divorce, and children fell under a similar provision, they
gave up rights to guardianship of their children, so Isaac
never saw his mother again after this point. Adam remarried

(03:15):
two years after the divorce, but Isaac never really bonded
with his stepmother, So just twelve years old, he left home.
He struck out for Rochester. It is possible, though kind
of unconfirmed, that he first stayed with an older brother.
Once he got there, he sought out of school to
attend and he spent most of the next seven years
trying to make up for his previous lack of education. Yeah,

(03:38):
and that that is sort of a really interesting aspect
of his story, Like he was not required to go
to school at this point. That was a voluntary school
attendance on his part, because he really did feel like
he would have rather been going to school throughout his childhood.
And when he was nineteen, Singer got a position as
a machinist's apprentice, and this seemed like he was on

(03:59):
track for a really stable career. This was actually considered
sort of cutting edge technology at the time, But this
apprenticeship only lasted four months. Singer would later claim that
in those four months he had learned all that a
normal apprentice would have learned in the customary seven years
of study with a master. But an entirely different interest
had grabbed the young man's attention, and that was acting.

(04:22):
He started taking odd jobs with the Rochester Theater, doing
everything from taking taking tickets to being a prop man,
all the while waiting to finally be cast in a play.
He did eventually earn some small parts and then the
lead role in Shakespeare's Richard the Third he would later
tell reporters that he was quote one of the best
richards of his day. He was not very modest, and

(04:48):
also the reviewers did not agree with him. No UH
and around this same time he met a young woman
named Catherine Maria Hailey, and Singer, who was nine teen
it's still at this point, married her in December of
eighteen thirty and he had the first of many children
just a few years later. But Singer was often gone.

(05:08):
He would travel to other towns for theater jobs, which
he held in addition to a day job that he
had at a dry goods store in the town of
Port Gibson, where they lived, but he was pretty half
hearted about his UH dedication to that regular job. In
eighteen thirty six, Isaac, Catherine, and the baby moved to
New York City. At the time, rumors were already swirling

(05:32):
in Port Gibson that Singer had come to know a
great many of the ladies there quite intimately. This is
the kind of rumor that will crop up over and
over in today's episode. UH. In New York, Isaac took
some odd jobs to make ends meet, and there were
once again, almost immediately rumors of his proclivity to be

(05:54):
unfaithful to his wife, but at this point he was
more concerned with pursuing his acting career or than he
was with his reputation. He joined a group called the
Baltimore Strolling Players in eighteen thirty six, once again taking
any jobs that he could until he could break into
acting roles with them. Was while performing with the Strolling
Players in Baltimore that Isaac met eighteen year old mary

(06:16):
Anne Sponslor, and it wasn't long before Singer proposed a sponsor,
and in autumn of eighteen thirty six, he moved her
to New York City. Imagine her surprise when she discovered
a wife and child in the mix. However, Singer was
a very smooth talker. He was apparently very charming with
the ladies, and he convinced his young love that his
marriage was all but over and that they should live

(06:38):
as husband and wife while he worked out his divorce
so that they could then be legally married. In the meantime,
Isaac and his actual wife Catherine had another child. Although
Isaac would continue his relationship with mary Anne Sponsler for
the next twenty four years, she was patient and he
was barely very very very charming and convincing, and they

(07:02):
had ten children together over that twenty four years. Unlike Sponsor,
though Catherine did not stick around. She took her two
kids and moved in with her parents. They're divorce didn't
actually happen for more than two decades, though, and though
he claimed to a dore Sponsor, Singer was not really
around for her either. Even as she was burying many

(07:22):
many children, he was once again traveling to find work,
sometimes at this point as a day laborer, and in
eighteen thirty nine, at the age of twenty eight, he
invented a rock drilling machine. This ended up sort of
designed for government use, and he filed a patent on it,
and he sold the rights to that patent for two
thousand dollars, which was a substantial amount of money at

(07:43):
the time. It seems like he used that money to
start a theater troupe called the Merit Players, and they
went on a national tour. Mary Anne and their first
son joined him on the road, and the family and
the rest of the troops spent eighteen thirty nine eighteen
forty four mostly in a wagon while they went from
town to town. Marianne and Isaac had three more children
during this period of constant travel. That sounds so miserable

(08:07):
to me, but what do I know. Singer, who performed
under the name Isaac Merritt during this time, finally ran
out of money and he had to shutter his theater
enterprise in eighteen forty four, out of money and done
with acting after trying and failing to earn a living
at it for fourteen years. At this point, Singer instead
picked up right where he left off career wise before

(08:28):
his stint on the stage, and he once again turned
to machine work. We will talk about his return to
working with machines in just a moment, but first we're
going to pause for a break word from sponsor. Singer

(08:48):
set up a shop in Pittsburgh in eighteen forty six
that made wood type letters and raised sign letters, and
a few years later, in eighteen forty nine, he patented
his second invention, and that was a wood and metal
carving machine. So this basically could make printing type for
in lettered blocks, and he decided to move to New

(09:09):
York City once again, this time with the intent to
set up shop as a manufacturer, and he established a
factory there to mass produce these carving devices. His family
suffered while he followed this dream. At this point, there
were six children, not enough money to cover expenses in
anything but the most bare way, and he persevered. Though

(09:30):
he did manage to set up a machine shop. But
this little factory was really short lived. A boiler explosion
destroyed the entire business, and sixty three people died when
that happened. While Singer himself survived because he was out
at the time of the explosion, he was destitute. He
eventually convinced George B. Zeeber, who was a publisher and bookseller,

(09:52):
to invest in his carving machine so he could build
another prototype to replace the one that had been destroyed
in the explosion. And just in the children tally, I
feel like I should mention that those six children were
the ones he had with Mary Anne. Catherine still had
the other two children elsewhere she was living, I believe,
with her family at the time. Uh and Singer had

(10:13):
to move his shop to Boston as part of his
agreement with Zeber, which he did, although his family stayed behind,
and in point of fact, it was actually both families
staying behind in New York City because by random happenstance,
his wife, Katherine, moved into the city and ended up
just a few blocks away from his home with Mary Anne.
Just to keep everything super awkward, well, nobody in the

(10:37):
publishing industry seemed really interested in Singers carving machine. Singer
and his partner were interested in something new that they
saw in the shop they had rented, and that was
sewing machines. Yeah, they had rented a little space in
this shop where they could kind of show off their
piece and have people come and visit and see it.

(10:57):
And also in this shop were lots of sewing machines.
So since his business was non existent, Isaac started examining
the various sewing machines that came into the shop, which
was owned by a man named Orson C. Phelps. And
as you may recall from our episode from several years
ago about the invention of the sewing machine, they were
still very very new at the time, and there was
not one basic approach to how they worked, but several.

(11:20):
So there were multiple different designs because numerous different entrepreneurs
were vying to establish themselves as the manufacturer of the
best sewing machine. There's some discrepancy in the accounts of
Singer and Phelps as to exactly how this situation sparked
Singers work on a new version of the sewing machine,
Phelps claims to have challenged Singer to come up with

(11:41):
a design, since he was quick to point out what
was faulty in all the models that he saw, but
Singer was initially not interested and pretty reluctant. Singer of
course left all that out when talking about his invention later. Yeah,
he definitely describes it much more as being really inspired
to fix the the problems of others. Uh. But in

(12:03):
the end, Singer, Zeeber, and Phelps did enter into a
partnership in which Phelps offered workspace, Zieber contributed financially, although
he was really quite strapped at this point, having put
a lot of money into this carving machine that they
were working on. Uh. And then Singer handled the design
in the building and it was less than two weeks,
only eleven days from when he had the idea and

(12:26):
figured out his design too when he had a first
model built. And so for clarity, sometimes when you read this,
it makes it sound like he just went off by
himself and toiled like a madman in a small room alone.
But he was not doing this toiling solo. He had
men from Phelps's machine shop at his disposal, and he
conducted the whole business with equal parts of foul, temper

(12:47):
and charm. As he got all of these men working
on things, he apparently was a bit moody, and sometimes
he would yell at the workman, and sometimes he would
sing to them. Singers Machine made you so many of
the technologies that other inventors had already come up with.
It could stitch continuously on a free arm, and it

(13:07):
could stitch curves. He added a thread control mechanism and
moved the needle into vertical positions. Singers Machine included a
presser foot, which offered greater control of the fabric as
it passed through the needles stitching mechanism, and it could
sew at a blazing nine hundred stitches a minute. And
for context of how amazing this is, you have to

(13:28):
remember that this was a time when sewing was an
essential skill for just about every woman who kept a house,
and sewing was extremely time consuming. She had to do
all of the hand stitching that maintained her family's wardrobe,
and that took up a significant chunk of her life. Normally,
Singer went back to New York to apply for the
patent on the machine, as well as for the birth

(13:49):
of yet another child with Mary Anne. Isaac allegedly showed
the midwife and the nurse who were on hand this
exceptional machine that he had designed for sewing even while
Mary Anne was in labor to deliver their child. Unfortunately,
the new baby only survived for a few days. Uh.
He also kept from his partners the fact that while

(14:09):
he was in New York filing the patent for this trip,
he only put his name on the paperwork. Pretty much.
Isaac Singer and his partners immediately started advertising and marketing
the sewing machine, and Singer called on his experience in
the theater to do so. He would stage demonstrations at
fairs and in stores, and he would sing a melodic

(14:31):
version of the poem The Song of the Shirt by
Thomas Hood throughout these demonstrations to try to help drying crowds.
And this machine worked, and it worked really well. Previous
versions of the sewing machine had been persnickety and prone
to breaking down, but the Singer machine was consistent and sturdy. Yeah,
I will give him that for sure. The reputation that

(14:52):
continued to follow I mean, I I have I have
bought a sewing machine in a long time, but I
know when I was learning on my mother's singer that
was still the rip station they had. Yeah, they we'll
talk about it a little at the end. They had
a little dip in the like eighties and nineties, but
then they've kind of bounced back. And again, I mean,
you have to give him credit. He really did sort
of smooth out the problems that most machines had. And

(15:14):
that song of the shirt, if you've never heard it,
is kind of about a person toiling and and you know,
needing to take time to work on things. So, uh,
while we credit him, was smoothing out a lot of
problems there in terms of the engineering of the sewing machine.
As you know, if you listen to our episode on
the sewing machine and its invention, you know that many

(15:35):
of those previously existing technologies that Singer was using had
been created or significantly modified by a man named Elias How.
And when How got wind of Singers machine, which happened
when he saw one of singers older sons demonstrating it,
he immediately claimed patent infringement. How first demanded a royalty
payment of two thousand dollars, but Singer, who was not

(15:58):
the last bit shy about being aggressive in business, responded
with physical threats. It's basically kicked off a long and
contentious relationship for the two men, and we won't rehash
the entire thing since we talked about it in detail
in that previous episode, but here are some highlights. As How,
who had pursued legal action against several other inventors who

(16:20):
he claimed we're also using his sewing machine designs, started
to have some success in those legal efforts, Singer, worried
that it might work against him, went on the offensive,
so uh he tried to discredit house position as inventor
of many of the items that he claimed patent rights too,
and he also started a smear campaign against How in

(16:41):
the press, with which How fought with a libel suit.
There was eventually a patent trial, and How was ultimately
the winner in that legal battle. Throughout all of this
legal wrangling, Singer was producing sewing machines and refining his design.
He partnered with another man, Edward Clark, in the meantime.
In eighteen fifty five, the Singer sewing machine won a

(17:02):
first place medallion at the Paris World's Fair after Clark
submitted it to the exposition, and the ire and the
legal wrangling around the sewing machine and who had invented
what did eventually die down as part of that. In
eighteen fifty six, the Sewing Machine Trust, which was a
combination patent held by how Singer and a few additional

(17:23):
inventors who all had skin in the sewing machine game,
was formed, and this rights agreement allowed all of the
various players to benefit from the manufacture of the machine
that all of them had really contributed to developing. The
year after the Sewing Machine Trust, in eighteen fifty seven,
Singer and Clark formed I AM, Singer and Company. And

(17:43):
this is a really momentous step in the shift of
sewing machines from industrial tools to home goods. Clark and
Singer very smartly started mass manufacturing sewing machine parts in
New York, and in doing so, they made it possible
to produce machines at a significantly reduced cost. And this
meant that people could buy machines for home use for

(18:04):
just one hundred dollars, and they did. The Singer sewing
Machine was so successful that the company opened three more
new York manufacturing facilities just one year later. Additionally, Singer,
who was guided by the astute business acumen of Edward Clark,
set up rent to own payment plans where customers could
pay a monthly rate for their new machine, eventually paying

(18:26):
more than they would have if they had just bought
it outright, but owning it at the end of the
rental agreement and being able to use it in the meantime.
Singer also started hiring women to demonstrate the machines instead
of the male members of his team, to prove that
even the finest of ladies can handle the machinery that
he built, and to really make sure his sewing machine

(18:47):
became a standard in the homes of all respectable ladies.
He offered machines at discounted prices to the wives of
pastors and ministers of all denominations. So while how gets
the credit for inventing the sewing scene, most of the
time we've talked about in that old episode, it's a
lot more complicated than that. Singer is really the man
who brought it into the home market in eighteen sixty,

(19:11):
so just a few years after the partnership with Clark,
I am Singer and Company was the largest manufacturer of
sewing machines in the world, and this the massive sales
numbers that they were able to start making outside of
the US actually positioned the company really well to whether
the storm of the U. S Civil War intact part

(19:32):
of that success. Particularly the personal wealth that Isaac Singer
enjoyed was the result of aggressive and often ruthless business
practices on entrepreneurs part. When he had first started his company,
you'll recall he had gained financial backing and shop access
from George B. Zeeber and orcein Cy Phelps, but he

(19:54):
had absolutely no sentimentality about that relationship. Uh. In terms
of Isaac Singer, he really didn't care for those men,
particularly Apparently he bullied Phelps out of the company really
early on, and then he pressured Zeber to sell his
interest to him when Zebra was told he was quite
ill and believed that he was at the end of

(20:14):
his life. Incidentally, Zebra was not either of those things,
But while he was pondering his seemingly imminent death, Singer
told him that he should wrap up his business affairs
and take a buy out before he passed, so that
would spare his grieving family. The fiscal troubles that they
would need to wrap up once he was gone. Singer

(20:34):
got his buy out, but as it turned out, it
had all been an elaborate trick on his part. I
feel like we're saying this over and over, but what
a jerk? What a jerk? Uh. We are now going
to speak a little bit more about Isaac's later life
and how his philandering eventually caught up to him. We

(20:55):
will say what a jerk several more times, I have
no doubt. But first we are gonna pause and to
have a break. And here from one of our sponsors.
We've had some podcasts on the show before about people
who were really kind of ruthless in their business world

(21:17):
and then also hoarded the profits. That was not Isaac
Singer at all. He was flamboyant in his spending. He
moved Marianne and their children from their humble home on
the Lower East Side to a progressively nicer lodging as
his success grew, and eventually they were on Fifth Avenue,
which was home to only the wealthiest families. His neighbors.

(21:39):
They're never really accepted Isaac and Maryanne, though they certainly
partook in the huge parties that the duo hosted. The
singers were nouveau reach and utterly goshen their taste. For example,
while he was in New York, singers main means of
transport was this black and bright yellow carriage that he
had designed and had custom built. This carriage was large

(22:02):
that needed at least six horses to pull it, so
Isaac was contributing to the manure problem we discussed recently.
Sometimes he had more than that on the team he
would have He would have a live musicians ride along
with him so he could always have music, and as
many as thirty one passengers could ride in this vehicle,
which also had an onboard bathroom and sleeper beds, and

(22:27):
he needed all those seats for his large and seemingly
ever growing family. As his fortune grew, he made an
effort to reconnect with his eldest son from his first marriage,
uh And in the early eighteen fifties, when things were
starting to really spark for him in the business world,
he also started two more long term affairs with women

(22:47):
named Mary McGonagall and Mary Eastwood Walters, both of whom
lived in New York City. So this means that he
still had his estranged wife Catherine, as we said before,
was allowed before their divorce king final, as well as
Marianne and these two new Mary's. Of course, there were
also more children with McGonagall and Walter's. And in eighteen

(23:10):
sixty he finally did divorce Catherine, although he made her
confess to adultery before he would give her her settlement
payout of ten thousand dollars. Yeah, and she had um
taken up residence is my understanding with another man at
that point. But she hadn't lived with him for a
long time, and he had been living with several other people. Uh,

(23:34):
And so it would seem that now he could fulfill
his promise that he would marry Marianne once his divorce
was settled, twenty four years after they first talked about it.
She had been patiently waiting for a quarter of a century.
But then he told her that he did not want
her to have power over him, so he was not
going to enter into a legal marriage. This is again

(23:56):
a point where we say, what a jerk. Sorry. Not
long after this, Mary and spotted Isaac riding in a
carriage with Mary McGonagall, and she began ranting at the
two of them. Singer later beat her for her outburst.
It was, not surprisingly, given his temper and business, not
the first or last time that he was violent with

(24:16):
a woman. He was, however, arrested this time because Marianne
called the police. Singer retired in eighteen sixty two, though
his company, of course kept going strong. In eighteen sixty three,
the company incorporated as the Singer Manufacturing Company. It had
gained twenty two more patents at that point and it
was planning to launch an overseas factory, which it did

(24:38):
in Glasgow, Scotland in eighteen sixty seven. When he retired,
he moved to Europe, and this is often characterized as
flight from New York because the Big Apple had grown
complicated and fraught for this ostentatious and philandering entrepreneur. He
was often being hounded by the press because of allegations,
allegations of domestic use. And additionally, all this press meant

(25:02):
that all these women who had set up households of
him knew that they were not unique in terms of
being his partner. Yeah, he had basically led each of
them to believe that they were living in a monogamous
household and that he just traveled a lot. But really
he had multiple households throughout the city. Uh mary Anne

(25:23):
Sponslor made a divorce case claim against Singers estate. She
claimed that they basically had a common law marriage, and
while she was awarded a large alimony payout of eight
thousand dollars annually, Singer renegotiated through his attorneys to a
much lower rate of fifty dollars per week. Mary Anne
ended up disgraced, however, and stripped of her alimony when

(25:46):
it was revealed that she had married another man shortly
after this settlement was reached. She was the one who
ended up scandalized as an adulterer. Despite singers constant infidelities
to multiple women at once the common law marriage was dissolved,
she was left with nothing. He had been the man
of the house in three different houses at the same time,
and he had eighteen children, and in a deeply seedy move,

(26:09):
Mary mcgonagall's younger sister, Kate, traveled to Europe with him
as his companion when he fled, although the two of
them didn't stay together long and where she went from
there is not clear. In eighteen sixty three, while he
returned on a visit to New York to settle his
divorce from sponsoror and dissolve his partnership with Clark. As
part of the incorporation of the company, Singer married his

(26:32):
second wife, who was already very, very pregnant. Wife number
two was a woman named Isabel Eugenie Boys Somerville. She
was recently divorced herself and was just a young woman
in her twenties. And she was not any of the
other women we have already referenced. No, he was a
new one. She was a new one. So, after he
married for the second time, Isaac and his bride lived

(26:55):
in the Fifth Avenue home. During this time, his first wife,
his first wife, Catherine, attempted to renegotiate the terms of
their settlement again. This resulted in a rift between Isaac
and the oldest son that he had had with Catherine,
as he had asked the young man to testify in
court against his mother, threatening quote, take your choice, your

(27:15):
mother with poverty or me with riches. He also threatened
to kill his son, William when William refused to testify.
The court case was eventually dropped. Yeah, we don't really
know like how that played out and how the case
went away, But William never had to testify one way
or the other, but the relationship was pretty damaged. UH.

(27:36):
In eighteen sixty four, Singer and Isabel built a new
home called the Castle in Yonkers, and there they threw
a lavish housewarming party, but very few people attended. They
still had the problem that people just thought they were
nuvau reach and they weren't really all that respectable during
the post Civil War reconstruction era. And after only a
short time living at the Castle, the Singers moved to

(27:59):
Paris in eight sixty six. As the Franco Prussian War
broke out. In eighteen seventy, Isaac and the family moved
to England, where they settled permanently. He had a massive
French Renaissance style home built built in South Devon called
the Wigwam, and in it he included a private theater
along with every other lavish room imaginable where he and
the family would put on plays. And one of the

(28:23):
interesting things about Isaac Singer's many romantic partners and all
of those children he ended up with twenty four documented
by the time it was all done, because he and
Isabel had several UH, while he could not stay true
to one woman, he really was pretty devoted to his kids,
with the exception of his eldest son William. After that

(28:44):
failed bribery attempt for perjury that did not work out,
and his home in England was built in grand scale
so that all of the rest of his known children
could live there with him. At the Wigwam, it seemed
like Singer found a sort of piece that had eluded
him throughout his life up to that point. He threw
three spectacular parties there every year on the fourth of July,

(29:05):
Christmas Day and his birthday. He even played Father Christmas
and gave out toys and food to less fortunate children
in the area, and several of his kids ended up
connected to rather notable Europeans. His son Paris, who was
his son with Isabel, had a child with Isadora Duncan,
who is known as the mother of modern dance. And

(29:27):
if that name is ringing sort of a grizzly bell,
it's because yes, she is the person you're thinking of
that died in a rather horrific car accident when her
long dramatic scarf, which was blowing in the wind, became
entangled in the wheel and and then rear axle of
her vehicle. Isaac Singer died from heart disease on July
eighteen seventy five. He was sixty three at the time,

(29:48):
and his wealth, which was estimated at eighteen million dollars
when he died, uh just invited immediate squabbling from the
many families he had started through the years. But he
had carefully arranged his will, so the money was divided
into sixty equal parts and distributed among his family members,
some of them receiving multiple portions. Yeah, it was very

(30:10):
very clear that he had favorites, like some kids would get,
you know, four or five portions and others would get
only a couple. Uh. And while William, with whom he
had fallen had that huge falling out, received only the
relatively tiny sum of five hundred dollars, and William's sister Lillian,
who was also Catherine's child, only got one thousand. Uh.

(30:31):
An interesting thing happened here, which is that the other
illegitimate Singer children, who had fared much better in the will,
each gave up a portion of their inheritance to supplement
those amounts that William and Lillian received, and so uh. Then,
of his many wives and other paramours, only Isabelle was

(30:51):
recognized in the will with any sort of monetary payout.
And while the Singer Company and its manufacture of sewing
machines did go through some bumpy times over the years,
as we alluded to earlier, it still remains a recognized
and pretty respectable name in the home sewing market. Yeah, uh,
you know, more than two hundred years after he was born,

(31:13):
his company keeps on trucking. I have a Singer that
is from nineteen eleven that has been in my husband's
family since it came off the manufacturing line. I need
to replace one of the belts or one belt on him.
There are one thing, They'll go forever, but they do
need some maintenance. There are some similarly old Singers in

(31:35):
my family. And then the one that I learned to
sew on was my mother's and that one was probably
from uh like the at the at the latest early seventies,
because she would have bought it before I was born. Um,
and then I used that as my sewing machine for
a while, and then we sort of traded sewing machines

(31:58):
after a while. So I'm pretty sure that and is
still in their home and still working. Probably that was
when they normally the home sewing market. Even though they
were the modernized machines not the old you know, cast
iron based treadles, they still had metal gears, whereas there
was a shift later to plastic gears, so they did
not last quite as long. And if you sewed a
whole lot over the course of several days, I discovered

(32:20):
the hard way you could fuse those gears together. Um.
But yeah, I mean, his legacy still remains, and it's
it always kind of cracks me up when you see like,
um him listed as like a great American entrepreneur and
I'm like, wow, he did some cool stuff, but we
gotta take a look at what was really going on

(32:42):
in his life because he was maybe not the best dude.
Uh yeah, highs and lows with that one. We have
a number of of like inventors of things with really
checkered pasts in our guys. I don't know. Yeah, I
also wanna, you know, I should give him some extra

(33:04):
guilt on that manure crisis thing, because while we talked
about the one huge carriage, he had many, many carriages
and he liked to race them up and down Fifth
Avenue to show off. Uh, So he was contributing more
than just that six to nine horse team that carried
the big crazy size one. Oh, Isaac Singer, You're a

(33:25):
mess a listener, Now I do. I have a couple
of pieces. I'm gonna try to be quick because I
know this episode ran really long. The first is from
our listener Abby, and she says, Dear Tracy and Holly,
I'm a longtime listener and was so excited to hear
you did a podcast on the Acumenate Empire because I
first started listening to stuff you missed in history class
in two thousand nine while living in the lands of

(33:47):
the ancient Acumenates. I was blessed to serve as a
peace Corpse volunteer in Turkmenistan from two thousand eight to
twenty two ten, and I squealed with excitement when I
heard you all mentioned Turkmenistan on the podcast. It's like
I do whenever I hear that name. Your podcast holds
a truly special place in my heart because of my
time in Turkmenistan, which was equally one of the most

(34:07):
fulfilling and lonely periods of my life, and it provided
me with solace. I served teaching English as a foreign
language as a volunteer in a village about twenty miles
outside of the capital city. My village which I am
not going to try to pronounce, but it was named
after a famous Turkmen poet, Uh And she worked at
the local school, teaching English to fourth to eighth grade students.

(34:29):
And she was the first American volunteer to live in
that village and was therefore the first native English speaker
that many of those villagers had ever seen, so she
needed to rely on her knowledge of the Turkmen language
to get by every day. She says, well, I love teaching,
and I truly appreciated my experiences in Turkmenistan. Life could
become very lonely when your communication is limited. I was
never very good at languages. I literally craved for conversation

(34:53):
and media in English. Another Peace Corps volunteer turned me
onto your podcast, and it became a great joy in
my life when English media is difficult to come by.
When I was lonely or having a tough time, and
I have rewatched all my episodes of the Office or
Gilmore Girls. Your podcast really helped me get by because
there was so much content that I could listen to,
and it actually felt like my brain was stimulated while

(35:14):
I realized it was your show's predecessors who got me
through some tough points in my personal Peace Corps experience.
I am confident that you ladies are providing soul as
for Peace Corps volunteers around the world, and for that,
I thank you. And she sent us some beautiful pictures
from Turkmenistan, and I just want to say thank you
to her as well. I one of my best friends
growing up and her husband both served in the Peace Corps.

(35:34):
I so appreciate the work that those people do, so
thank you, thank you, Thank you, Abby. I also wanted
to say a quick congratulations to Bethany and her husband Patrick,
who sent us a birth announcement of their baby Lucy
UH and they. Bethany mentioned that she listened to the
podcast a lot when she was on bed rest during
her pregnancy, and that UH she started the podcast at

(35:57):
one point when UH Loose You was having some issues
staying calm, and she started the podcast for herself, but
it actually stopped the baby crying immediately. I'm shocked that
I would have this effect on babies, since I'm scared
of them and they can smell fear. But I'm glad
it helped in this case. So congratulations Bethany and Patrick
on your your new little one, and I hope you

(36:18):
guys are all doing great. Uh. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at how stu works dot com. You can also
connect with us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History,
on Twitter at mist in History, at pinterest dot com,
slash missed in History at mist in history dot tumbler
dot com, and on Instagram at miss in History. If
you want to learn a little bit more about a

(36:40):
subject related to today's episode, you can go to how
stu works dot com. Type in the words sewing machine
in the search bar and you will get an article
called how sewing machines work. So if you want to
really see how Isaac singers work culminated in one pretty
standardized way of sewing machines being put together, you will
learn it all there. If you want to visit us online,

(37:00):
you can do that at mist in history dot com,
where we have every episode of the show ever, including
the ones by those predecessors that helped Abby get through
her Peace Corps time, as well as show notes for
any of the newer episodes that Tracy and I have
been working on together since we've been here, so there
are also some other goodies on there, so come and
visit us at mist in history dot com and how
Stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands

(37:26):
of other topics because it has to works dot