early years of sewing-machine manufacture was 

 the Singer Company, which overtook them by 1870 

 and finally absorbed the entire Wheeler and Wilson 

 Manufacturing Company in 1905. 



The founder of this most successful 19th-century 

 company was Isaac Singer, a native of Pittstown, 

 Xew York/' 2 Successively a mechanic, an actor, and 

 an inventor, Singer came to Boston in 1850 to promote 

 his invention of a machine for carving printers' 

 wooden type. He exhibited the carving machine in 

 Orson Phelps' shop, where the Blodgett and Lerow 

 machines were being manufactured. 



Because the carving machine evoked but little 

 interest, Singer turned his attention to the sewing 

 machine as a device offering considerable opportunity 

 for both improvement and financial reward. Phelps 

 liked Singer's ideas and joined with George Zieber, 

 the publisher who had been backing the carving- 

 machine venture, to support Singer in the work of 

 improving the sewing machine. His improvements 

 in the Blodgett and Lerow machine included a table 

 to hold the cloth horizontally rather than vertically 

 (this had been used by Bachelder and Wilson also), 

 a yielding vertical presser foot to hold the cloth down 

 as the needle was drawn up, and a vertically recipro- 

 cating straight needle driven by a rotary, overhanging 

 shaft. 



The story of the invention and first trial of the 

 machine was told by Singer in the course of a patent 

 suit sometime later: 



I explained to them how the work was to be fed over 

 the table and under the presser-foot, by a wheel, having 

 short pins on its periphery, projecting through a slot 

 in the table, so that the work would be automatically 

 caught, fed and freed from the pins, in place of attaching 

 and detaching the work to and from the baster plate 

 by hand, as was necessary in the Blodgett machine. 



Phelps and Zieber were satisfied that it would work. 

 I had no money. Zieber offered forty dollars to build 

 a model machine. Phelps offered his best endeavors to 

 carry out my plan and make the model in his shop; if 

 successful we were to share equally. I worked at it day 

 and night, sleeping but three or four hours a day out 

 of the twenty-four, and eating generally but once a day, 

 as I knew I must make it for the forty dollars or not 

 get it at all. 



The machine was completed in eleven days. About 

 nine o'clock in the evening we got the parts together 

 and tried it; it did not sew; the workmen exhausted 



with almost unremitting work, pronounced it a failure 

 and left me one by one. 



Zieber held the lamp, and I continued to try the 

 machine, but anxiety and incessant work had made me 

 nervous and I could not get tight stitches. Sick at heart, 

 about midnight, we started for our hotel. On the way 

 we sat down on a pile of boards, and Zieber mentioned 

 that the loose loops of thread were on the upper side 

 of the cloth. It flashed upon me that we had forgot to 

 adjust the tension on the needle thread. We went back, 

 adjusted the tension, tried the machine, sewed five 

 stitches perfectly and the thread snapped, but that was 

 enough. At three o'clock the next day the machine was 

 finished. I took it to New York and employed Mr. 

 Charles M. Keller to patent it. It was used as a model 

 in the application for the patent. 53 



The first machine was completed about the last of 

 September 1850. The partners considered naming 

 tlie machine the ''Jenny Lind," after the Swedish 

 soprano who was then the toast of America. It was 

 reported 54 to have been advertised under that name 

 when the machine was first placed on the market, 

 but the name was soon changed to ''Singer's Perpen- 

 dicular Action Sewing Machine" or simplv the 

 "Singer Sewing Machine" — a name correctly antici- 

 pated to achieve a popularity of its own. 



According to the contract made by the partners, 

 the hurriedly built first machine was to be sent to 

 the Patent Office with an application in the name of 

 Singer and Phelps. An application was made between 

 the end of September 1850 and March 14, 1851, as 

 Singer refers to it briefly in the application formally 

 filed on April 16, 1851, stating, "My present invention 

 is of improvements on a machine heretofore invented 

 by me and for which an application is now pending." " 



32 See his biographical sketch, pp. 142-143. 



53 Chester McNeil, A History of the Sewing Machine in Union 

 Sales Bulletin, vol. 3, Union Special Sewing Machine Co., 

 Chicago, Illinois, pp. 83-85. 1903. 



"Sewing Machine Times (Aug. 25, 1908), vol. 18, no. 418. 



65 Singer gives this limited description of the first machine, 

 with detailed improvements for which he was then applying 

 for a patent: "In my previous machine, to which reference 

 has been made, the bobbin was carried by the needle-carrier, 

 and hence the motion of the needle had to be equal to the length 

 of thread required to form the loop, which was objectionable, 

 as in many instances this range of motion was unnecessarily 

 long for all other purposes . . . ." Quoted from U.S. patent 

 8,294 issued to Isaac M. Singer. Aug. 12, 1851. It should be 

 noted that in some instances there was a considerable lapse 

 of time from the date a patent application was made until the 

 patent was issued. In this case the handwritten specifications 

 were dated March 14, 1851, and the formal Patent Office 

 receipt was dated April 16, 1851. 



30 



