SYMHC Classics: The Contentious Invention of the Sewing Machine

We're revisiting our 2013 episode on the invention of the sewing machine and the epic patent battle associated with it. The mechanization of stitching happened by way of a series of inventions, several of which finally came together.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, Hello. This is our next installment in our weekend offerings,
which are classic episodes that we're sharing again so that
some of our newer listeners can enjoy some of our
past topics. And today we're going to go back to
the invention of the sewing machines. Episode originally came out
in March. It is a topic near and dear to
both of our hearts, but it's also loaded with a

(00:25):
lot of drama in addition to covering the technical developments
that got us all to the point of being able
to sew with a machine. Yeah, there's even some violence.
It's very uh, it's high drama. So enjoy and hopefully
have a more peaceful day than they had. Welcome to
stuff you missed in history class from how Stop works

(00:47):
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm excited
because we're talking about one of my favorite things today.
It's an invention that I love and owe a great
deal of um gratitude to all of the people involved,

(01:09):
as do I not maybe to quite the extent that
you do, but I also am quite fond of what
we're talking about today, which is the sewing machine. Yes,
you so extensively every day, and I do not so extensively,
but I do know how to sew, and I have wonderful,
fond memories of my mother. Mostly they're fond. Sometimes they're frustrated,
but mostly they're fond of my mother teaching me how

(01:30):
to sew when I was a child. Oh yeah, my
mom didn't teach me. She sewed like a fiend. Just
about everybody in my family does. But I was one
of those people that did not want someone over my
shoulder telling me what to do. So she gave me
tools and I learned a lot by making a lot
of mistakes. But I still love it, and I literally
do so just about every single day. That's awesome. It's

(01:51):
a part of my you know, my life stability thing
to get at least a few scenes in each day.
And the invention of the sewing machine is actually a
pretty interesting story. It involves a lot more fighting and
anger than you might suspect, since we think about sewing
is kind of a nice, quiet activity, but it's uh

(02:13):
the invention of the machines that allow us to do
it not so quiet or delightful or peaceful. Not really.
If you watch Schoolhouse Rock growing up, you probably know
about a lie as how in a very you know,
punctuated short version of story. And if that's in the
Mother Necessity song, I love are wondering, I love it.
But there are actually a lot of different people in

(02:34):
the mix when it comes to who actually invented the
sewing machine, even though how does generally get most of
the credit in history, and there are reasons for that,
which we'll talk about. But the patent battle that went
on in the US about who got the rights to
it is like tabloid fodder, and it kind of did
play out in some ways in the papers and magazines

(02:56):
of the day, almost in the way that tabloids show
of celebrity arguments. Now. It's pretty fascinating. So prior to
sewing machines, of course, the very earliest way people were
sewing was to use a sharpened bone or stick and
punch holes in whatever their fabric was, normally leather, to
pass a lacing through right, so the stick or the

(03:18):
bone would go through it all away, and then you
would lace well, or you could just punch it, or
you could punch it. But it wasn't an all type situation, right,
But it wasn't like what happened later when needles got
eyes in them that you could actually put your lacing
through and draw the lacing through along with the needle. Yeah,
which was you know, a huge step forward in in

(03:40):
making sewing more easy and quicker. And then as needles
got refined and could be made smaller and smaller out
of metal, a whole you know, new form of art
was born in the form of embroidery. But getting to
the sewing machine is kind of an interesting trail because
it was right in step with the Industrial Revolution for

(04:02):
good reason. As textile manufacturer became more streamlined, less expensive,
people had access to more cloth, so they wanted to
make more things, but they needed to be able to
do so more quickly as well. So in seventeen fifty five,
Charles Wisenthal patented a needle for a sewing machine. The

(04:23):
machine never came to fruition, but the needle was interesting
because it had points on each end and an eye
in the middle, and it kind of passed back and
forth through the fabric and carried that the thread with
it to make sort of a um a stitch that
kind of replicated what human hands could do, right, and
a lot of the very first attempts to mechanize selling.

(04:45):
We're all about replicating what people do with their hands
when they saw yes. And then in sevent ninety was
the next significant patent. There are many many patents along
the way that we're not going to mention because they're
just really too numerous, right, it would become sort of
it would be a list. And then in se uh

(05:06):
but so then Thomas Saint, who was an English cabinet maker,
patented a machine and I know you love the title
of I'm gonna let you read it an entire new
method of making in completing shoes, boots, splatter dashes, clogs,
and other articles by means of tools and machines also
invented by me for that purpose, and of certain compositions

(05:28):
of the nature of japan or varnish, which will be
very advantageous and many useful applications. That is a really
good blanket coverall title for something that you're going to invent. Well,
and you still see patent titles that are like that
today that are the title is just so exceptionally broad.
If you're if you're looking for patents for specific things
you have to develop some patent searching mojo, and that

(05:50):
is very much like that, except that this one is
particularly long and delightful. Well, and part of the reason
is that st actually was describing three different machines and
that pat he really wasn't doing like a narrow pattern.
It was kind of like, I have all these good
ideas a patent all at once, and so that's why
they fall under one title. The second of those machines

(06:11):
is actually for stitching, and it wasn't really particularly practical,
but it had several components that we would associate with
modern sewing machines. It had a table where the cloth
could feed through, It had an arm with a needle,
and it had continuous thread feed from a spool. Now,
no actual examples of Saints machine have ever been found,
but there was an Englishman in eighteen seventy three that

(06:33):
found the plans for it and actually tried to build
the machine. It wouldn't work quite right, um, but he
eventually did some tweaking and and made one that more
or less worked. But that was another kind of big
advancement in terms of adding in things that got retained
in many for future models. Right, some people have theorized
that the st patent is on purpose a little bit

(06:56):
wrong so that no one could steal his ideas, which
is kind of that's a common patent trickery. Yes, So
that would explain why Newton Wilson, when he tried to
rebuild his just couldn't quite get it right without making
his own tweaks. In eighteen o four, Thomas Stone and
James Henderson got a patent in France. Their machine made
an overcast stitch that's a lot like a hand stitch,

(07:19):
like a whip stitch. So I was going to try
to describe what that looks like, and and I was,
it's going to be more confusing than if I just
skipped that it is. It's basically if you're stitching and
your thread comes, for example, up through the cloth and
then around the raw edge of the cloth and then
back in underneath, so that it makes kind of a spiral.

(07:41):
Right that The example that I am immediately seeing in
my mind is the way that Aragorn's sleeves are connected
to his vest in his Lord of the Rings costume,
like the primary one that he wears all through Fellowship
of the Ring, which is actually something that the costume
designers pointed out that he could just whip his sleeves
back on and then off got hot. So Thomas Stone

(08:02):
and James Henderson made a machine that would do that essentially,
but there since there wasn't a continuous speed on the thread,
it was a stop and goat process. Yes, so not
quite ideal, but we're getting closer. Uh. And also in
eight No. Four, John Duncan of Glasgow patented an embroidery
machine and it didn't really function in the same way
as a sewing machine for joining fabric, but it did

(08:23):
introduce an I pointed needle, which becomes really vital in
successful sewing machines in the future. So for a visual
and I pointed needle is one where the whole for
the thread is in the same end as the point,
the sharp point of it, which is the opposite of
how most hand selling needles mark. And that I point

(08:43):
a needle comes up in a I don't want to
characterize it as false, but there is an account that
comes up later in the as things really get heated up,
where one inventor claims that he had a vision for this,
and it's it's not always it's not substantiated. In any way,
and it's kind of bizarre. Will give a brief mention

(09:03):
of it, but this is important again. John Duncan in
eighteen o four with the eye point a needle. Yes.
So then in eighteen o seven Edward Walter Chapman and
Walter Chapman received a British patent for a machine that
was the first that did not require the needle to
pass all the way through the fabric. And this is
a significant development because again that's something that still holds

(09:25):
true in sewing machines today, but at the time there's
was the first that didn't kind of mimic hand stitching
and that the needle went all the way through one
side and out the other. Yes, Instead, it sort of
poked down and then it did not pass all the
way through and come out the other side like that.
The point of it goes all the way down, but
the whole needle doesn't pass all the way through. If

(09:47):
you haven't really watched the sewing machine work, uh, that
might not be the thing that you would visualize immediately,
but in a in a sewing machine today, the needle
kind of dips down and then out instead of going
all the way through and coming completely out the other. Yeah,
and it had two needles in the thread actually got
passed between them in a really sort of arduous rethreading technique.

(10:08):
And it was only intended to sew things like belting
and ropes together. It wasn't good for joining two fabrics
together for garments because it really did take quite a
long time. It would take you almost as long as
just hand stitching it. But the idea of the needle
not passing all the way through is important. In eighteen thirty,
Bartelomy Tomantier. It was a French tailor and his machine

(10:28):
created a chain stitch. It was the first machine to
be produced in a quantity, and he had eighty machines
that worked in a shop in Paris within ten years.
People were not super happy, especially tailor's taylor who had
been making their living by sewing things by hand, were
afraid that this machine was going to take away their livelihood,

(10:49):
and so a mob of angry tailor's broke into the
shop and destroyed all of the machines and Timonia was
forced to flee, but he did eventually obtain financial backing
to contin knew the development of his work um and
despite great advancements in speed, and the acquisition of three
new patents. He ended up holding two patents in France

(11:09):
and one in Britain. The French Revolution kind of stalled
his efforts and really robbed him of what could have
been a legacy in the sewing machine trade. Uh. But
then in eighteen thirty two to eighteen thirty four, Uh,
there's a really important development in America, which is that
Walter Hunt created a machine that made a lock stitch
and used to thread sources similar to like a spool

(11:32):
and bobbin that we use today rather than the single
thread chain stitch. And Hunt worked on a lot of
inventions and he didn't really see the sewing machine as
going anywhere for him. He didn't think it was particularly important,
so he sold it off without patenting it to a
George A. Aerosmith. Historians mark this design as the first
time that machine development stopped being about replicating human hand

(11:56):
stitching and actually just being its own thing and letting
the mecca is um kind of defined the design of
how it was going to do the stitching, but it
could only do straight lines, and it couldn't so for
a long continuous line. But Hunts machine design sat dormant
for a while, but two decades later, Hunt is going
to become a really major player in some of the

(12:17):
legal battles that were going on. One important thing to
note right about this time is that the American records
are a little foggy. Uh. The Patent Office had a
fire in eighteen thirty six that destroyed a lot of records,
so that was problematic and the legal battles that are
to come. Yes, and there's is a brief side note.

(12:38):
A lot of what was destroyed was the descriptions of items,
like they still had lists of patents that existed, and
they actually put a call out to people that held
patents and said, hey, send us a fresh description. We
lost those records, but not many people answered. So there
are a lot of inventions sitting in the legal record
there that are it's just the title. We don't know

(12:59):
what they were doing. Some of them were really simple,
like specialty alls that were made for certain fabrics. But
there's a lot of stuff that probably got lost along
the way right well, And there were huge advancements in
machinery happening right at that time, so it's unfortunate that
we have so few records of so many of them.
And then in eighteen forty two, John J. Greenow, who

(13:21):
was an American, also patented a machine that could make
a running stitch and a backstitch, but no models other
than the patent version were ever made, and his patent
remained significant because it's recognized as the first American sewing
machine patent because remember, Hunt didn't patent his invention, and
apparently Aerosmith, who he sold it to, didn't patent it either,
even though he had the rights at that point. Now,

(13:44):
in eighteen forty three, Benjamin W. Bean was awarded the
second US sewing machine patent. His machine was different from
the others because it fed the fabric through gears on
the way through the machine. These are precursors to what's
known as feed dogs today, which are these sort of
toothy little thing things that are under the fabric that
kind of nudged the fabric along under the presser foot,

(14:04):
which is the thing that holds the fabric down while
the needle does its work. Um Has also had a
clamp mechanism so that he could attach the sewing machine
to a table. And then in later eighteen forty three,
George H. Corliss, who you may recognize the name because
he also invented the corless steam engine, invented a mechanism
after examining split seams on a pair of boots. His

(14:28):
machine was given the third sewing machine patent in the US,
and it could perform what's called a saddler stitch to
join pieces of leather, which is a stitch that still
used in some machines today. Uh. But in eighteen forty
four he gave up on the machine because he couldn't
get financial backing and he was really more interested in
his steam work at that point. A year later, James

(14:48):
Rodgers got the fourth US sewing machine patent. He really
only had one small change to the design that Bean
had developed earlier. The gears were positioned a little differently
to a out for a simpler needle shape, and later
patents of Beans used the same setup. And then we
get to like the heavy hitter. Yes. Elias how Jr.

(15:12):
Uh And he was born to a farming family in Spencer,
Massachusetts in eighteen nineteen, and he left home at sixteen
to make his way training as a machinist, and he
eventually landed a job in Boston and allegedly he overheard
a conversation in the instrument shop where he worked between
two people regarding the need for a mechanized method for sewing,

(15:34):
and that allegedly sparked him to work on a design
of his own at one point when he was homesick
from work and his brain was just going a little
bit crazy being idle. There's also this is where I'll
mentioned that weird sort of rumory legend d part of
the story, which is that in some instances how claims

(15:55):
that he had a dream involving like tribal chiefs. It's
very um interesting. There are actually a lot of online
places where you can look at dream analysis of this
dream that led him to the use of the I
pointed needle for the machine, but we know it had
already been in use, and in fact, he doesn't mention

(16:15):
that in the patent or claim in his patent that
he invented that. So it's kind of an interesting, weird
side story, and it often gets told as, oh, the
idea for the showing machine came to him in a dream,
but that's really oversimplified, and it's kind of taking the
actual engineering part of it out of the equation, which
isn't really smart to do. Right. I I usually take

(16:36):
the it came to me in a dream inventor story
with a grain of salt, because while it's completely feasible
that as you're thinking on something you may have sort
of an epiphany on it while sleeping, like it's usually
presented as bolt from the blue, out of nowhere, suddenly
had this dream, which is not very likely and is
more often just an attempt to mythologize where the thing

(16:59):
came from. Actually, and we know, I mean, we've been
you know, discussing all of these sort of small steps
forward in sewing machine engineering. That none of this just
sprouted overnight. It was all, you know, a slow burn
developmental process. Right. These things built on one another for
a long time. But in September of eighteen forty six,
How was granted the fifth U S. Patent, which was

(17:20):
Patent number fifty for a sewing machine, and it was
actually his second version of the sewing machine. His first
prototype was working in eighteen forty five and was used
to sew seams on at least two and possibly more
men's suits that were made of wool and house. Pattent
includes five very specific claims as to the working to

(17:41):
those to his machine, and those came up later in courts. Again,
none of them mentioned a dream scenario where he thought
of how to make a needlework. And we're not going
to read all five of them because it is kind
of a lengthy description, but they basically cover the forming
of the seam, the lifting of the thread, holding the

(18:02):
thread in place by shuttle, the way of arranging and
combining levers with a sliding box, and holding the cloth
to be sewed uh into the machine. So this are
sort of the five steps that his patent covered. And
all of these are kind of interesting because most of
them involve action created by the combination of other pieces.

(18:26):
None of these say I invented this piece or that piece.
It's all pretty much focused on the engineering of how
pieces came together, right, His patent is very process oriented
rather than which is very important in later legal battles.
But how tried for three years to get manufacturers interested
in his design and willing to make it, and really struggled,

(18:48):
and eventually, with the help of his brother who he
sent on ahead of him to England, they sold the
British patent rights to William Thomas for two fifty British
pounds sterling, and How actually went to Britain to work
with Thomas and adapted the machine to make umbrellas and corsets,
but that business deal did not prove to be especially profitable.

(19:10):
Some accounts suggest that the relationship between How and Thomas
got really, really contentious and argumentative, and that Thomas didn't
really want to pay How as an employee the salary
that he had suggested he would pay. Once the changes
to the initial machine had been made. He was kind
of done with him. So there's a little bit of

(19:30):
drama there now, but How decided to come back. In
the meantime there's another development and eighty eight, John A.
Bradshaw was granted the sixth US Selling machine patent. His

(19:52):
design was focused on correcting errors and How's designs and
some of his language here is just a little insulting.
He's not very nice about it. Um One of the
things that happens in patent is a thing called the
prior art, and that sort of a description of all
the stuff that came before what you're patenting, and his
would include language like this is a very bungling device

(20:14):
and as a great incumbrance to the action of the
machine that was his description of How's needle design right.
So in eighteen forty nine How returned to the US
after leaving his British business endeavors and discovered that there
was a lively sewing machine enterprise of foot that in
the time that he was gone, Suddenly people went, oh,
sewing machines are a great idea, we should be making

(20:37):
and selling them. Uh. And there was even a machine
which was which had the seventh U S Patent based
on Bradschad Bradshaw's design that was in production and being
offered for sale. The patent went to Charles Morey and
Joseph B. Johnson in eighty nine, but they were actually
selling it even before the patent was granted and finalized,

(20:57):
and before all of that, they were also featured in
Scientific American, which was featuring a lot of articles about
various machine developments, and sewing machines come up in it
a lot. Then, in mid eighteen forty nine, Jatha S
Knit was issued a patent on a slightly modified version
of the Maury Johnson machine. His change had to do

(21:19):
with the way that the cloth was held. Taught during stitching.
If you don't hold your cloth with the right tension,
your stitches are going to be all bunched up and yucky.
So that's an important development, but it seems to have
died on the vine. It didn't actually get into production.
But on the very same day that the knit patent
was issued, John Batchelder was also given a patent for
a model that featured a continuous sewing mechanism and an

(21:42):
endless belt to feed cloth into the machine, and Bachelder
sold that patent to I Am Singer, to Isaac Singer.
You'll know that name if you do any sewing in
the mid eighteen fifties, and it actually became one of
the most important elements of singers designed. I learned to
sew on a singer. I think most people did of
our age well. And in addition to having learned to

(22:02):
sew on a singer, I know that both of my
grandmother's had in their their stuff that came with them
when they got married and established a household treadle sewing
machines that were singer machines. I have a treadle singer
that is from I think nineteen ten, yes, and it
was in Brian's family from the day it was sold.

(22:22):
Like they purchased it, and it's been handed down and
came to me, and I'm very grateful for It needs
some restoration, which is one of my side projects that
I never get to but I will eventually. So sadly
this thing that has quite fond memories for both of
us is also where suddenly sewing machines become all kinds
of contentious, really really argumentative things going on. So in

(22:45):
eighteen fifty, Allan B. Wilson was working on a lock
stitch machine which used a mechanism very very similar to
the modern machine. His mechanism could also stitch forward and backward,
which was a first uh, and he applied for a
patent after making a set a prototype model, but he
was contacted by the people who owned the brad Shop
patent from eighty eight with a claim that they owned

(23:06):
the concept of the double pointed shuttle that made up
part of his machine, and that claim was completely false,
but Wilson couldn't afford to fight them, and he gave
up half of his claim to A. Pe Cline and
Edward Lee in November of eighteen fifty, but after just
a few months he sold them the rest of his
interest and retained only limited rights, and he pretty much
got shafted in the deal. He never made any money

(23:28):
off of it. He didn't even I don't think, get
full payment for all of the rights that he sold them,
and it was it was not true their claim in
the first place. Yeah, but he just didn't, you know,
he was uh, you know, relatively modest means inventor. He
didn't he couldn't fight a big business at that point,

(23:48):
so he kind of found what seemed like the most
equitable solution, which is to sell at that point. But
they went on to pretty decent success with it, and
they still used his names in the app. They actually
placed an added Scientific American in eighteen fifty one that
said a by Wilson's sewing machine the best and only
practical sewing machine, not larger than a ladies work box,

(24:10):
for the trifling sum of thirty five dollars. Just they're
still making money off of his name, and he's just
he's not involved anymore, completely out of the loop and
kind of mistreated. At that point, Elias Howe decided that
he needed to protect his rights and royalties from all
of these inventions that were being sold everywhere, and so

(24:31):
if he could trace his roots back to his design,
he went after them. Before How's work, most machines were
taking all kinds of different approaches to making stitches, but
from Bradshaw on most of the stitching processes were improvements
on the design and his patents number fifty or his

(24:52):
patent number forty seven fifty from eighteen forty six, so
if he could trace work back to that, he would
jump on it. Yes, And in eighteen fifty, after watching
one of Isaac Singer's sons perform a demonstration of their
machine that they were selling, How contacted Singer about the
infringement on his patent and eventually demanded two thousand dollars
in royalty payment. And at the time, you know, the

(25:14):
Singer family was just starting out selling some machines. They
were like, we don't have that kind of money. Uh.
And he came back later and I was like, well,
you're doing pretty well now and demanded a bigger sum.
And then negotiations did not go well and got really ugly.
In a hurry, Singer physically threatened to lie as How uh.
And Singer was known for having a bit of a
hot temper and doing some kind of unkind dealings. And

(25:39):
intimidation tactics when it came to his work with business partners.
So between How who felt very wronged at this point,
and Singer, who was pretty aggressive, which paid off for
him in many ways, it really got ugly in a hurry.
But in eighteen fifty two How found a way to
fight them, which is that he sold half of his

(26:00):
interest in his patent to George Bliss, who manufactured machines
that he built his house patent, but they actually had
changed pretty significantly from how his original design. But even so,
the money that How made from this partnership funded his
patent lawsuits, of which there were many, and he really
went after Singer with vigor. He did not like him.
He sued other manufacturers, but the suit against Singer was

(26:21):
the most combative, and after a judgment though in house
favor in a suit that he had brought against UM
a group called Laro and Blodgett, other firms started to
settle because they kind of saw the turning of the
tide and that probably other judgments were going to fall
in house favor. So a lot of firms were just like,
how can we work this out out of court? Yeah, Basically,

(26:42):
now that he had the money to do it. He
was winning. Yes. In eighteen fifty three, as suits were
beginning to be settled, How started selling his royalty licenses.
He sold them to a lot of different groups, Um
along with his brother. Uh. These licenses let manufacturers use

(27:02):
any part of the How patent in their machines, and
some of them were stamped with his name and patent information. Uh.
Some have been incorrectly identified as house machines when they
really weren't. And his brother, also manufacturing machines at this time,
was pretty successful at it. So were we really have
two big players at this point, How and all the
people he sold his royalty licenses to and singer yes.

(27:27):
And then in on July eighteen fifty three, two advertisements
ram on the same page of the New York Daily Tribune.
I will read the first one. It says the sewing machine.
It has been recently decided by the United States Court
that Elias How Jr. Of number three oh five Broadway
was the originator of the sewing machines now extensively used.

(27:49):
Call it his office, and see forty of them in
constant use upon cloth, leather, et cetera. And judge for
yourselves as to their practicality. Also see a certified copy
from the records of the United States Courts of the
injunction against Singers Machine so called, which is conclusive. You
that want sewing machines be cautious how you purchase them
of others than him or those licensed under him. Else

(28:11):
the law will compel you to pay twice over right.
So at that point there was in an injunction against
singers machine. It was kind of like being put on hold,
but the suit had not settled yet. And then there
is the other ad that ran, which is the singer ad.
The singer ad said sewing machines. For the last two years,

(28:33):
Elias how Junior of Massachusetts has been threatening suits and
injunctions against all the world who make use or sell
sewing machines. We have sold many machines, are selling them rapidly,
and have good right to sell them. The public do
not acknowledge Mr. House pretensions, and for the best reasons.
One machines made according to how It's patent are of

(28:54):
no practical use. He tried several years without being to
being able to introduce one too. It is notorious, especially
in New York, that How was not the original inventor
of the machine combining the needle and shuttle, and that
his claim to that is not valid. Finally, we make
and sell the best sewing machines. It all sounds so polite,

(29:15):
but it's so snarky. It's really snarky, and it's so
different from what we think of and adds today that
it's not at all what you would expect to see
with two companies that are in in competition with one another. Uh,
and How went after Singer for libel because you know,
Singer at that point was not just saying that they

(29:37):
were selling machines, but that How was wrong and that
he didn't invent these things. And these were all, you know,
part of a an ongoing legal battle, so they kind
of were really playing fast and loose with language. You'll
notice the houses very careful to only say things that
are accurate and true and like come and see the
certificate we have from the government. But not at no

(29:58):
point does he say, you know, and Singers an idiot,
or that he he's trying to steal ideas like he
It's very carefully worded, whereas Singers is a little more Singers.
Singers is like this guy is a liar and he's stupid. Yeah,
so that's why how I went after Singer for Liabel
and the New York Daily Tribune as well. There is
also a story about Scientific American kind of printing there, like, okay,

(30:22):
the libel thing against the papers a little silly, you guys,
Like they kind of would post these opinions on the
state of affairs periodically, which is kind of interesting. Singer
kind of went on a personal crusade to discredit how
his claim to writes on the selling Machine. He would
seek out machines and inventors that predated How his work
to try to prove that what How did was not original.

(30:46):
He went to Europe and even China. And the problem
was the wording of how It's patent. He had patented
the combination of the shuttle and the I pointed neatle,
not just the invention of a particular element of the machine.
So his patent claim was pretty accurate. Nobody had patented
that process. All these different pieces of it had been patented,

(31:08):
but not all put together correct. So eventually Singer even
colluded with Walter Hunt, remember him from earlier on. He
made a machine and never patented it. He uh he
brought in engineer William Whiting Singer did to help resurrect
Hunt's design because Hunt apparently found old pieces of the
machine like in an attic, but couldn't actually get them
all together and working anymore. He couldn't quite remember how

(31:31):
it all went, But so this engineer assisted him. And
then Hunt attempted to file for patent on his eighteen
thirty four invention to establish that he and not Elias
How had in fact invented the sewing machine. Again, the
Scientific American kind of made their opinion known. They published
a rather scathing commentary on Hunt's assertions, calling them quote

(31:53):
rusty claims UH. And a trial at the Patent Office followed.
And after hundreds of pages of testing money like, Singer
found everybody he could to kind of feed Hunt's case
because he really wanted to take down How any way
he could. Uh. There were hundreds and hundreds of pages
in a long drawn out trial, but Pattent Commissioner Charles

(32:13):
Mason ruled in favor of How on eight fifty four,
and he said the Mason said that Hunt's loss was
due in part to the eighteen years he sat on
his design. UH. And Hunt actually appealed to the Circuit
Court of the District of Columbia, claiming that Mason didn't
really have the authority to make such a ruling, but
Mason's ruling was upheld by the court. So, spurred by

(32:36):
the success of this decision and still in a big
fight with Singer, how decided that the next thing he
would do was file suits against every establishment selling Singer
machines in Boston and asked for preliminary injunctions to shut
down those sales. Uh Hunt's previous invention was invoked by
those named in the suits, claiming, no, no, there's still

(32:57):
some doubt even though there had been a ruling already
as to whether or not how really had the rights
to all of the machines being sold, And so they
tried to, you know, they were dredging up that case
that had already been decided. But the judge in the
matter still deemed House patents infringed upon and he found
in House favor. So the Boston defendants, who were now

(33:18):
in some serious business trouble, they had had their business
basically shut down, they turned around and filed suits against
Singer for basically kind of dragging them into this mess.
And giving them patents and machines that they really had
no legal right to sell. Singer and How eventually settled
their suit, and they announced they had done so in

(33:39):
Scientific American in August of eighteen fifty four, which should
have settled the matter, but it did not at all.
The piece did not last for very long. Um. Now
that he was in control of the sewing machine industry,
How started working on improvements to his own machine. But
this resulted in a lot of the companies he had
gone after suing him for patent infringement, since many of

(34:02):
them held patents on the basic improvements that he was
trying to implement. There's just no end to the litigation.
There's really not. In eighteen fifty six, the president of
Grover and Baker, which was one of the companies involved

(34:23):
in these suits against How. The president's name was Orlando B. Potter,
and he proposed an interesting truce, a concept which became
known as a combination, not to be confused with the
undergarment of the same name, a patent combination. And he
kind of took a step back and realized, we are
all just hurting ourselves at this point. We are wadded
up in litigation all the time, and we are holding

(34:47):
up production and just throwing money into legal actions. What
we would rather be doing is making and selling sewing machine.
So he started said, let's do that. Yeah, they all
joined forces. Uh Potter's Company, How, Wheeler, Wilson and Company,
and Singer all joined forces. They pulled their patents to
make one unified combination patent for sewing machine and how

(35:10):
it was pretty resistant to this idea at first because
he felt like he was giving up more than anybody
else in order to get this deal together, but he
eventually relented. Um he only agreed to join the sewing
machine Combination, which is sometimes called the sewing Machine Chap trust,
if the other parties agreed to stipulations. And those stipulations

(35:31):
were pretty astute business moves. One was how would get
a five dollar royalty on every machine sold in the
US and a dollar for every machine that was exported
to another country. And it's estimated that between eighteen fifty
six when this deal was struck in eighteen sixty seven,
when house patent expired, he made more than two million dollars,
which there are several layers of that's crazy. One is

(35:54):
the two million dollars. We're talking about, you know, two million,
eighteen sixties dollars um and the fact that he was
so invested in all this litigation when his patent was
on the verge of expiring. I mean, part of this is,
of course he had to do it then, because otherwise
he would have lost everything. And then part of it
makes me kind of go I probably would have thrown
up my hands much earlier when I was getting that

(36:15):
close to the expiration of a patent, but you would
have missed out on two million dollars. I know, I'm
a terrible business person. But in eighteen sixty seven when
house patent was up, so after his eleven years of
enjoying all of that money coming in, he did request
another extension of the patent, but he was refused and
he actually died later that year. Singer, of course we know,
because his name is still on sewing machines sold all

(36:38):
the time. Wasn't astute businessman, and he really made a
name for himself in that industry. I feel like we
should do another podcast on the Singer family because there
is a world of fascination in the things that happened there.
But that's how it eventually settled. There was a lot
of fighting and fighting and clawing, and then a settlement,

(36:59):
and then a little more biting and fighting and clawing,
and then some person that steps forward and says, this
is really stupid. We could all be making money, so
let's go make money now. Yeah. I'm glad that they
finally came to that. Me too, because sewing machines are awesome.
How would I have all my sewing machines otherwise, I know,
how would I have learned how to make nightgowns and

(37:20):
pajamas and things. I don't know why nightgowns and pajamas
are the things that I thought of, but we know
my mom My mom taught me how to make easy things.
I didn't learn how to put a zipper in until
I was much older and no longer living with my mom. Bufflegowns,
we wouldn't be able to make bufflegowns to look like
we lived at the time when these people were fighting. Yeah. Well,
and it wasn't until we were I was looking at
your outline for the podcast that it really dawned on

(37:42):
me how similar umbrellas and corsets are to one another.
I kind of had that moment as well, where I
was like, oh, yeah, there's a casing and then a
firm element that goes through it. Yeah, it does make totally.
It's all kind of stretched tight together over a frame.
Like that's really they're the same thing, just in a
different orientation in the shapes. Hey, since uh, these episodes

(38:06):
that we're sharing our past classics, we have some updated
information that will supersede the contact stuff you've heard before.
If you want to email us, our email address is
History Podcast at house works dot com, and you can
find us across the spectrum of social media as Missed
in History. You can also find us at missed in
History dot com, and you can visit our parent company,

(38:27):
how stuff Works, at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
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