THE MAN WHO REMADE GARMENT MAKING

Table of Contents

ELIAS HOWE

Howe spent his early adulthood as a machinist's apprentice in Lowell and Cambridge, learning the mechanical trades that would eventually consume his life. The idea that made him famous was a machine that could sew fabric faster and more consistently than human hands, it was not a flash of genius so much as a slow grind against a problem that had defeated inventors for decades. Howe patented his lockstitch sewing machine in 1846, using a design with an eye-pointed needle and a shuttle that carried a second thread beneath the fabric, a configuration that became the mechanical basis for nearly every sewing machine built afterward.

American tailors and seamstresses, fearing the machine would destroy their livelihoods, largely ignored it, and Howe struggled to find buyers at home. He traveled to England to license the technology, only to be cheated out of much of the value of the deal by a corset manufacturer named William Thomas, who bought the rights cheaply and then reduced Howe to working as a mechanic in his own machine's development. Howe returned to the United States in 1849 poor, in debt, and with his wife dying of tuberculosis, a low point that makes the mythology of instant inventive triumph look considerably less tidy than it is often told.

By the early 1850s, a wave of manufacturers, most notably Isaac Singer, had begun producing and selling sewing machines that incorporated Howe's patented lockstitch mechanism without paying him. Howe sued, and after a bruising legal fight won a landmark 1854 decision establishing that his patent was valid and had been infringed. Rather than build his own dominant manufacturing empire, Howe instead organized the Sewing Machine Combination in 1856 with several of his rivals, one of the first major patent pools in American industrial history, through which he collected royalties on nearly every machine sold in the country.

The downstream effects of the sewing machine's spread were enormous and mixed. It gutted the home-based needle trades and the piecework economy that had employed huge numbers of women, while simultaneously creating the industrial garment factory as a labour category, with all the crowded, often exploitative working conditions that model would come to represent by the century's end. It also made ready-made clothing affordable at a scale that reshaped consumer life for ordinary families. Howe died in 1867, having lived just long enough to see the machine bearing his patents become a fixture of homes and factories worldwide.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.