SEWING MACHINES. The idea of mechanical sewing was originally conceived in England, though the first practical sewing-machine was undoubtedly produced in America.
Saint's 179o, Thomas Saint, an English cabinet maker, was granted a patent for " an entire new method of making and completing shoes, boots, spatter-dashes, etc.," and, though he may have constructed only an experimental machine, it yet embraced many of the germs of the perfected sewing-machine of the present day. It possessed (I) a horizontal supporting surface for the cloth, to resist the thrust of the needle; (2) an overhanging arm, to whose outer end was attached (3) a vertically reciprocating straight needle fed by a continuous thread from a spool placed at the top of the arm; and (4) a mechanism by which the material was moved automatically after each stitch. The inventor con ceived the idea of sewing a scam without passing the entire needle through the material, but by pushing through it a loop, to be so held open by a hook as to receive the loop of the succeeding stitch. This interlooping or enchaining of stitches resulted in the production of what is known as the " chain- " or "single-thread " stitch (p. 172). The needle employed by Saint was so forked at its lower end as to span the thread and push it through a hole previously made by an awl in the material; the tension of the thread was adjusted by tighteners above and below. To Saint, there fore, must be accorded the honor of devising a connected piece of machin ery, however crude it may have been, which was the prototype of the modern sewing-machine. An English patent in 1807 is also the first to show an automatically operating contrivance with an eye-pointed needle to carry a thread through the material to be connected.
Thinumnier's 183o, BarthClemy Thimonnier, humble French tailor, patented a sewing-machine which was so far suc cessful that in 1831 he was made a partner of the firm of Germain Petit Co., and set up on Svres street, in Paris, a workshop where eighty machines, rudely constructed of wood, were in use for making army-cloth ing. At this time workingmen were hostile to every kind of new ma
chinery, and these sewing-machines •were destroyed by a mob, as the Jacquard loom and Hargreaves's spinning-jenny had been years before. Thimonnier escaped with his life and again set to work to improve his machine, and was so far successful, notwithstanding the privations under which lie labored, that in 1845 his apparatus was run at the rate of two hundred stitches per minute, whereas the machine of 183o was unable to make more than one stitch at each movement of the treadle. In i848 he applied for an improvement patent for his machine, which he called " con sobrodenr," but, the French revolution of that year having stopped his business, lie went to England, where, after staying a few months, lie sold his patent to a Manchester firm and returned to France. Exhausted by thirty years' struggling and suffering, he died penniless at Amplepuis in 1S56.
Thimonniefs machine 53, fig. 1) comprised a horizontal bed for the support of the material; an overhanging arm, which was con structed as a sliding frame, and which was alternately depressed and returned by a treadle and spring; and a vertical needle with a hooked or barbed point. The hooked needle penetrated the cloth and caught a lower thread, by means of a thread-carrier and looper, from an ordinary spool, and in rising drew a loop of thread with it to the surface of the material and within a nipple sleeved upon the stem of the needle, the nipple resting upon the goods during the descent of the needle and rising when the latter cleared the goods. After the loop was drawn up, the cloth was moved by hand the length of a stitch, and the needle was again thrust downward through the material; in its next ascent it brought up a loop through the one previously formed, thus producing upon the sur face of the stuff the chain of the stitch, unlike the Saint machine, whose chain was on the under side of the cloth. Thimonnier's machine was patented in the United States in 185o.