The Sewing Machine War: how a patent tangle gave birth to buying on instalments
By the 1850s, America's sewing machine makers spent as much energy suing each other as selling. The fight over needles, shuttles and feeds grew so tangled it became known as the Sewing Machine War. Its resolution produced one of the first patent pools, and Singer's side hustle, paying in instalments, changed shopping forever.
Inventors had chased the idea for a century. Charles Wiesenthal won a British patent for a double-pointed sewing needle in 1755, and in 1790 Thomas Saint drew up a chain-stitch machine for leather and sailcloth, though he probably never built it. When sewing-machine maker William Newton Wilson discovered Saint's drawings in the Patent Office in 1874, he adjusted the looper and made one that worked. The first practical machine came from French tailor Barthelemy Thimonnier, patented in 1830. His factory sewing army uniforms was burned, reportedly by tailors afraid for their jobs.
Elias Howe built his lockstitch machine in 1845, putting the eye of the needle near the point. After a spell in England he came home to find rivals, including Isaac Merritt Singer, using his ideas. Singer had redesigned a clumsy rotary machine he saw being repaired in Boston, adding a vertical needle, a presser foot and a treadle that freed both hands. Howe won in court in 1854, and Singer ended up paying him 1.15 dollars per machine.
In 1856 Singer, Howe, Wheeler and Wilson, and Grover and Baker pooled their patents in the Sewing Machine Combination, charging everyone else 15 dollars a machine until the last patent expired in 1877. Allen B. Wilson's contribution endures: the four-motion feed, which moves cloth forward, down, back and up, is in every sewing machine today. Singer and his lawyer partner Edward Clark, meanwhile, pioneered hire purchase so families could spread the cost.
The payoff in time was dramatic. A man's shirt that took fourteen and a half hours by hand could be made in about one. Machines costing 6 to 15 pounds became fixtures in middle-class British homes in the 1860s, and Singer launched electric models in 1889.
Source: Sewing machine
