340 JOHN A. BOSHARD 



only for hand embroidery, and not until 1770 was the princi- 

 ple applied to sewing machines. In this year Thomas AIsop 

 patented a machine in England which used the double pointed 

 needle for embroidery purposes. Later, in 1804, a machine 

 for embroidering in a loom with a large number of needles 

 was conceived by John Duncan, and the idea was still further 

 carried out and perfected in Heilman's embroidering machine 

 patented in England in 1829. The first officially recorded 

 attempt made in the United States to construct a sewing 

 machine on the principle of the short thread and double 

 pointed needle was by John J. Greenough, who built and 

 patented a machine in 1842. It was designed for sewing 

 leather and other hard material, an awl piercing a hole in 

 advance of the needle. The material to be sewed was held 

 between clamps provided with a rack, which was moved both 

 ways alternately, to produce a back stitch, or continuously 

 forward to make the shoemaker's stitch. The material was 

 fed automatically the length of the rack bar, at a rate deter- 

 mined by the length of stitch required. The needle was 

 passed through and through the material by means of pincers 

 traveling on a rack, the thread being drawn out by weights. 

 When the thread became too short or was broken, the machine 

 stopped automatically. 



Greenough's sewing machine, like similar attempts at 

 mechanical stitching which embodied the features of the 

 through-and-through stitch and short thread, was of no prac- 

 tical use; but it possessed some valuable points, and holds 

 a creditable place in the history of the industry. 



Inventors early sought to apply the old crochet stitch 

 to mechanical sewing. Among the records of the English 

 patent office has recently been found the design of a sewing 

 machine intended to execute the old crochet stitch, which 

 was patented by Thomas Saint, July 17, 1790. This machine 

 is the first attempt at mechanical sewing, so far as any official 

 record shows, and this makes more remarkable the fact that 

 many of the essential features of the modern sewing machine 

 are embodied in the design of the Saint machine. These 

 features are crude, it is true, and may never have been prac- 

 tical in their operation; but the fact remains that the horizon- 



