“... the sewing machine was as awe-inspiring as the space capsule [was to twentieth-century people]"
Grace Rogers Cooper, writer
The history of the sewing machine begins in 1790, with a patent by British inventor Thomas Saint for a device (never built) to puncture leather and repeatedly pass a thread through the holes. In 1830 Frenchman Barthelemy Thimonier successfully built a machine that also used this "chain stitch" method. Within a dozen years he had built eighty machines, but they were destroyed by a mob of angry tailors.
The first person to develop the sewing machine as we know it was American Walter Hunt (1796-1859), in 1834. His crucial innovation was to use two spools of thread (on an upper spindle and a lower bobbin) and an eyed needle to create "lockstitch"—the two threads lock together when they pass Through the hole.
Hunt, also the inventor of the safety pin, failed to patent his sewing machine. This made it easy for fellow American Elias Howe to patent a lockstitch machine twelve years later. Howe defended his rights against many rivals, most notably Isaac Singer, who had tried to patent a new device based on Hunt's machine. Howe won a court case and Singer was forced to pay him royalties—but it was Singer who pioneered mass production and whose name, to this day, remains synonymous with the sewing machine.
