In 1843 there was patented in the United States by B. W. Bean a form of sewing apparatus which is now known as the " running-stitch " machine. The needle, pointed at one end and with an eye at the other end carrying a short length of thread, was held stationary between toothed rollers, and the material, in convolutions, was fed upon the point, along the body, and off the heel of the needle upon the thread, the operator pushing the fabric back upon the thread as in hand basting. There have been patented in the United States and in England a number of varieties of this machine, which are used principally for sewing together the ends of materials to be bleached, dyed, or printed (see p. 172).
Hunt's 1833, Walter Hunt of New York invented a sewing-machine with a curved eye-pointed needle operated by a vibrating arm and penetrating the cloth, and with a shuttle that passed through the loop made by the needle-thread, and by drawing it up on one side of the cloth making what is known as the " lock-stitch." The material was suspended vertically between clamps moved automatically after each stitch; but the machine could sew a seam only the length of the clamps without being stopped. Moreovet, the seam had, substantially, to be parallel with the actuating mechanism of the clamps. Hunt laid aside his machine, which was destroyed, and was forgotten until 1854, when he applied for a patent, which was refused him on the plea of abandonment. The main features of Hunt's invention had, however, been patented in 1816 by Elias Howe, thus anticipating by eight years the application of Hunt, who by inattention to the value of his apparatus lost one of the greatest opportunities of the nineteenth century.
Howe' s —The ingenious contrivances above described illustrate substantially the progress of the art of machine-sewing up to the date (1846) of the invention of the machine by Elias Howe, whose name is indissolubly associated with the history of the sewing-machine. From the foregoing it will be seen that the invention was a development, and not an inspiration. Sporadic attempts were made to solve the problem of mechanical sewing and to embody it in a successfully-operating machine. The greatest advance was the lock-stitch of Hunt, but, as above stated, i't for Howe to be declared the inventor.
As originally made, Howe's machine (oI. 53, f
4) consisted essen tially of a curved and grooved eye-pointed needle carried at the extremity of a vibrating arm, a shuttle with its point at one side of its axis and carrying a bobbin or cop, and a so-called " baster-plate," composed of sharp-pointed wires projecting laterally, comb-like, from a thin curved metallic plate, which was actuated intermitting]}' by a toothed wheel engaging with holes in the plate. It employed two threads, one of which was projected through the material, while the other was carried by the shuttle. The grooving of the needle was devised so as to receive and protect the thread from being broken by the rapid movement of the needle through the fabric. The point of the needle being driven about three fourths of an inch through the material, the needle-thread, extending from the last stitch to the eye of the needle, formed the chord of the arc of the needle, and through the space thus formed the shuttle was projected by reciprocating drivers, so that when the needle was withdrawn the two threads were left interlocked at the point where the needle perforated the cloth. Before the needle penetrated the goods, a sufficient length of thread was drawn from the spool to afford the requisite slack to the needle and needle-thread for the passage of the shuttle between them. This slack thread was held up by a lifting-pin, which prevented the entangle ment of the thread under the needle-point. The tension of both the needle- and the shuttle-thread was so adjusted as to cause the stitch to have the same appearance on both sides of the fabric, the interlocking point of the threads being drawn within the material. The edges to be united were vertically impaled on the wires of the baster-plate, which after each stitch was moved by the above-described mechanism. The length of the seam that could be sewed without stopping the machine was the same as that of the baster-plate; and when the latter had passed its full extent under the needle, it was necessary to stop the machine, remove the cloth, return the plate to the first position, and readjust the cloth. The latter was retained on the wires by means of an adjustable plate, and the outer side of the shuttle-race presented a bearing surface for the cloth, to resist the horizontal thrust of the needle.