Howe's early career was a struggle with misfortune, but his indomi table energy finally brought hint financial success. Soon after he received his patent one of his machines was sold to William Thomas, a London corset-maker, who made Howe a proposition to come to London and adapt the machine to the manufacture of stays. The offer was accepted, and in 1847 he sailed for England, where, after remaining but a short time in the employ of Thomas, he was reduced to such extremes of poverty that he pawned his American patent-right to obtain means for returning to New York, where he arrived in 1S49. During his absence in England sewing machines had come into use in the United States. Against the infringers of his patent Howe instituted suits, which were sustained, and henceforth he gathered a golden harvest. He admitted at the time of his application for a second extension of his patent (1867) that he had received $1,185,000 from his invention.
The feasibility of mechanical sewing being demonstrated by the Howe machine, there followed in rapid succession other inventions of consider able ingenuity and excellence.
Batchelder's 1849, John Batchelder produced a machine which was the first to combine a horizontal support for the cloth, an eye pointed needle, and a continuous feed. The supporting surface for the material consisted of an endless belt with projecting pins, carried on roll ers, which moved intermittingly and put in motion the fabric after each stitch. A seam of any desired length could be sewed, but the pills of the feed-belt prevented the moving of the cloth in any direction except with the feed.
the Batchelder machine a patent was granted the same year to S. C. Blodgett and J. H. Lerow for a rotary shuttle, or one which drove the shuttle in a circular race with each stitch. The needle descended through the material and then rose slightly, to form a loop of the needle-thread; the shuttle entered the loop and the needle again descended a little, while the shuttle passed through the loop, where upon the needle ascended above the cloth. This movement is known as the " dip" motion.
& 11'ilson of the most ingenious inventions of this period, and the next in historical importance, was that devised by Allan B. Wilson. His first machine employed a straight eye-pointed nee dle and a shuttle reciprocating in a curved race, but in subsequent patents (1851-52) he dispensed with the shuttle and substituted for it the disc bobbin and the rotary hook, which catches the loop of the needle-thread, expands it, and passes it around the bobbin, within which is wound the lower thread, leaving the latter in the loop of the needle-thread. The rotating hook was a new departure from all former methods of sewing, and it effected by rotary motions what had previously been performed by reciprocating motions, while at the same time the speed and the efficiency of the sewing-mechanism were increased. The most important feature of the invention, however, was the " four-motion " feed. This feed
mechanism is so constructed that in rising and falling the material is intermittingly caught, fed forward, and released, and, moreover, allows the cloth to be turned, twisted, or moved by the operator in any desired direction between any two successive stitches. This feeding device is used in nearly every machine now constructed. Figure 14 05/. 54) exhibits all early type of the Wheeler SL Wilson machine, and Figure 15 one which embodies the latest devices.
Singer's 185o, Isaac M. Singer of Boston saw in opera tion a Blodgett machine whose construction he concluded could be unproved. His idea was to make a machine which would embody a horizontal cloth-plate, a yielding presser-foot, to bear upon the cloth, a vertically reciprocating straight needle, and, placed below the cloth-plate on a horizontal axis, a feed-wheel with projecting pins, to engage the cloth and move it forward with each stitch. He constructed a model machine in eleven days, but it would not sew and was pronounced a failure. It was remarked, however, by one of the promoters of the enterprise that the loops of the thread were upon the upper surface of the cloth, when it instantly occurred to Singer that the adjustment of the tension of the needle-thread had been forgotten. After the tension had been adjusted five perfect stitches were made, when the thread snapped. But that was sufficient: it betokened the ultimate success of his invention; and this original (fi/. 53, fig. 5), which was subsequently much improved, was practically the first machine used as a substitute for human fingers in Singer's inventions contributed to the sewing-machine the following original devices: (1) A rotating shaft ill an overhanging arm, a crank-pin or roller, and a heart-shaped cam, to give positive action to the needle-bar; (2) a pressure-foot at the cud of a vertical rod, to hold the material down upon the feeding device, and so adapted by means of a spring as to yield to the thickness of the fabric; (3) a rotating feeding-wheel, which pro jected through and above the horizontal cloth-plate; (4) a friction pad, to prevent the kinking or twisting of the thread under the point of the descending needle; (5) a spring guide upon the shuttle, to control the slack of the shuttle-thread and keep it from being caught by the needle; and (6) he gave to the shuttle an additional forward movement after it had momentarily stopped, to draw the stitch tight, this being effected while the feed moved the cloth in the reverse direction and the needle completed its upward motion, so that the two threads were simultaneously drawn. Singer was also the first to construct a device to lay an embroidering thread upon the surface of the cloth, under the needle-thread, and the first to invent a machine for ruffling. Attachments for braiding, embroidering, etc., are now adapted to every popular machine (p. 173). Figure 13 (o/. 54) rep resents an improved machine with oscillating shuttle.