August 12 - Home Sewing Machine Day

nPosted on August 12, 2019

Key Points

Almost as long as humans have needed warm clothing, we have sewn:

nScientists have found needles with eyes that can be threaded, which are around 40 thousand years old, although a bone fragment that may have been a needle point is about 61 thousand years old.

nEarly humans used thorns, sharpened rocks, and bone slivers as needles and sinew and plant material as thread. The earliest iron needles ever found were Ancient Celtic, dating back to around 300 BCE. Ancient Chinese people invented steel, and a sewing kit complete with metal needles and thimble dates back to 202 BCE; the Europeans learned steel-making from China and began to make steel sewing needles in the 900s CE.

nOf course, all of that deals with hand sewing, but today is about sewing machines! Well, the history of sewing machine dates back to the late 1700s, when a variety of European and American inventors worked on making sewing quicker by creating sewing machines. One of the first successful machines was invented by a French tailor in 1830. By the end of the decade, this tailor had created a factory with around 80 sewing machines that made uniforms for the French army.

nEven though a tailor was the inventor, other tailors saw the machine as a threat to them and a group of them destroyed the factory and all the machines inside!

nAround the same time, anxiety about seamstresses caused another inventor – this one in the U.S. – to abandon work on a promising sewing machine design. He worried that his machine would make the seamstresses, who were already quite poor, completely destitute.

nNot many years after the destruction of the factory and its sewing machines in France, and the abandonment of sewing machine plans in the U.S., Elias Howe patented a double-thread sewing machine with a grooved, eye-pointed needles.

nAnd on this date in 1851, Isaac Singer patented the first rigid-arm sewing machine. Singer was able to convince the public to buy his machine, provided service with every sale, and introduced installment-plan purchasing to make it possible for many more families to afford one of his sewing machines. He ended up with riches and a name that lives on!

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