Howe

Ari Davis, a watch-maker primarily, but also a
maker of surveying instruments and scientific
apparatus for Harvard professors. Davis was an
ingenious mechanician and, in spite of his eccen-
tricities, was much consulted by both inventors
and capitalists. In this ideal environment, with
the finest of mechanical devices upon which to
practise, Howe became both skilled and deft as
a machinist One day he overheard Davis sug-
gest to a would-be inventor that he make a sew-
ing machine, and from that moment he brooded
over the possibility of devising a machine which
would sew with the same motions as the human
hand. In the meantime, Mar. 3,1841, he married
Elizabeth J. Ames of Boston. He at length con-
structed a machine with a double-pointed needle
and eye in the middle, but it proved an utter
failure. In 1844, however, he made another at-
tempt, this time having in mind a lock-stitch and
an eye-pointed needle united with a shuttle, an
idea derived from the looms he had been familiar
with all his life and had helped to make in the
factory at Lowell. While the idea in the end
proved a good one, he had first to devise a shuttle
loaded with a lower thread and the means of
throwing the shuttle at the proper intervals
through loops of the upper thread. Soon after
beginning this second machine, he gave up his
nine-dollar-a-week job with Davis in order to
devote his whole time to the task he had set him-
self. His father helped him by boarding him and
his family in Cambridge, where he was then liv-
ing. Howe later prevailed upon a friend, George
Fisher, to become his partner, Fisher receiving
the Howe family into his home as guests and ad-
vancing five hundred dollars toward buying ma-
terials and tools. Throughout the winter of 1844-
45 Howe labored steadily at his machine and by
April 1845 he had completed it to a point where
it sewed with evenness and smoothness. In a
public demonstration it exceeded in speed five of
the swiftest hand sewers, for it could make 250
stitches a minute. Notwithstanding its success,
however, Howe met with financial discourage-
ment. In 1846 he completed a second machine,
and after inducing Fisher to advance the neces-
sary money, he took it to Washington, where he
deposited it in the Patent Office with his applica-
tion for a patent. This was granted Sept 10,
1846, patent No. 4750 (House Executive Docu-
ment 52, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 125, 308-09).
Since he could arouse no interest in his machine
in the United States, he decided to offer it in
England. Accordingly, in October 1846, his
brother Amasa went to London with a third ma-
chine and succeeded in selling it for £250 to Wil-
liam Thomas, a large manufacturer of corsets,

Howe

shoes, and umbrellas. This transaction also
gave to Thomas the entire rights of the machine
for Great Britain. Seeing the possibilities of
adapting it to sewing leather, Thomas induced
Howe, through his brother, to come to London,
and advanced the passage money. After working
eight months for fifteen dollars a week, Howe
quarreled with Thomas and found himself strand-
ed By pawning his model and patent papers he
raised enough money to send his family home,
and a few months later he returned in a sailing
vessel, paying his way by cooking for the steer-
age. He arrived in Cambridge in time to reach
the bedside of his dying wife. Meanwhile
knowledge of the favor with which his machine
had been received in England had reached the
United States, and some manufacturers had al-
ready begun to make and sell sewing machines
like Howe's in design. With a hopeless feeling,
at first, he sued these manufacturers for infringe-
ment, using money advanced by George W. Bliss
who had become his partner through the purchase
of Fisher's half interest in the patent One of the
longest fights in American patent law followed,
continuing from 1849 to 1854. With the pro-
ceeds of one or two successful suits, Howe made
and marketed a number of sewing machines in
New York, and thus kept himself alive. Finally
his patent was declared basic and a judgment
for a royalty was granted to him on every ma-
chine that infringed his patent (Howe vs. Un-
derwood, 12 Federal Cases, 678). Shortly after
this Bliss died and Howe for a nominal sum ac-
quired full ownership of his patent. It expired in
1860 but was extended for seven years in March
1861, and in these years Howe's royalties often
reached $4,000 a week. During the Civil War
he organized and equipped an infantry regiment
in Connecticut, and though he placed his means
at its disposal he served in it as a private. In
1865 he organized the Howe Machine Company
of Bridgeport, Conn., and the perfected Howe
machine which he there produced won the gold
medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. After the
death of his first wife, he married again (Howe
Genealogies'). He died in Brooklyn, N. Y.

[Howe's own account of his invention and develop-
ment of the sewing machine, including the litigation, is
printed in Before the Hon. Philip F. Thomas, Com-
missioner of Patents, in the Matter of the Application
of Elias Howe, Jr., for an Extension of his Sewing
Machine Patent (1860). See also The Howe Exhi-
bition Cat. of Sewing Machines & Cases (1876), issued
by the Howe Machine Company; Practical Mag. (Lon-
don), V (1875), 321-24; James Parton, in Atlantic
Mo.f May 1867; Geo, lies, Leading Am. Inventors
(1912); W. B. Kaempffert, A Popxlar Hist, of Am.
Invention (1924), vol, II; E. W, Byrn, The Progress
of Invention in the Nineteenth Century (1900); J. L.
Bishop, A Hist, of Am. Manufactures from 1608 to
1860 (1864), vol. II; N. Salomon, His*, of the Sewing

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