It took thousands of years for sewing to get beyond the shoemaker's way of doing it. Women learned, to be sure, how to make different stitches, such as the plain seam and the hem. Fine spun thread took the place of coarse twist and the leather thong. The bone needle with an eye at one end and a point at the other gave way to delicate steel needles. Still, sewing continued to be done by hand, stitch after stitch, first one, then another, hour after hour. Even up to the days of our own grandmothers, the family sewing continued to be the burden of the home.

Men in England, France, and America worked for years to relieve the home of this drudgery. Machine after machine was invented, but each of these was a failure. Not until 1846, did an inventor succeed in doing for the sewing machine what Watt did for the steam engine, Stephenson for the locomotive, and Fulton for the steamboat. The inventor was Elias Howe, who was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819.

Howe's father was a farmer, who, in addition to his farm, had a gristmill, a sawmill, and a shingle machine. To the farm at Spencer, the neighbors brought their wheat and corn to be ground into flour and meal, and their logs to be sawed into lumber or split into shingles. Yet with all his labor, the income of the father was small, and supplied only a modest living to a family of eight children.

In the pleasant surroundings of this New England farm, Elias Howe spent his childhood. Many were the rambles through the near-by woods for squirrels and nuts. The brook running through the farm afforded good swimming and fishing in the summer, and good skating in the winter. When he was old enough, the boy did all sorts of simple farm work, and helped at odd jobs about the mills and shingle machine. Each winter found him in the district school. Elias thus grew up, a happy, good-natured, play-loving boy. If his chances to obtain an education at the district school were not very good, this lack was made up, at least in part, by the opportunities he had to see and know trees, plants, and animals; and by being able to learn how to do things with his hands, and to become acquainted with tools.

The father's first thought was to make Elias a farmer. At eleven years of age the boy was apprenticed, as was the custom of the day, to a neighbor, where he was to live and work until he was twenty-one. Elias was not strong, having a lame foot. This made farm work hard for him. After trying it for a year, he decided to give it up. Returning home he went to work in his father's mills, where he remained until he was sixteen.

About this time a friend of Elias's came back to Spencer from Lowell, Massachusetts. He told what a big and busy place Lowell was, and how Elias could get employment there and earn more money, and earn it more easily than at Spencer. Elias's ambition was thus stirred to go to Lowell and become a mechanic. It was not his liking for machinery that led him to go; it was the thought that a mechanic makes his living at easy work. Elias was not a lazy boy, but hard work so taxed his strength as to be very distressing to him. It was thus natural for him to want to avoid physical labor. His physical weakness led him also to do much thinking about how to do things with the least possible labor.

At Lowell, Elias was taken on as a learner in a factory for making cotton machinery. Here he worked for two years, when the factory shut down. Drifting to Cambridge he found, after a few months, a place much to his liking, with Ari Davis, who kept a shop for making and repairing watches, clocks, surveying instruments, and the like. Besides, his head was full of ideas of great machines. To hear him talk, it seemed not at all difficult to make a profitable invention. Naturally almost every workman in his shop had the inventor's bee. Still, Ari Davis's shop was not a bad place for a young country boy to be in, and it was here that Elias Howe gained the suggestion which led to the invention of the first successful sewing machine.

One day in the year 1839, a man came to the shop who was working to perfect a knitting machine. He was at his wit's ends, and brought the model to Davis to see if he could help him.

Davis in his extravagant way said, "What are you bothering yourself with a knitting machine for? Why don't you make a sewing machine?"

"I wish I could," replied the caller, "but it can't be done."

"Oh, yes, it can," said Davis. "I can make a sewing machine myself."

"Well," said the other, "you do it, and you will have a fortune."

These remarks were taken by most of the workmen as idle boasts. Not so with Howe. He kept brooding over the idea of "inventing a sewing machine and making a fortune."

As the boy brooded, this resolution slowly took form in his mind: "I will invent that sewing machine and win that fortune."

To Howe, a country boy just turning twenty, the idea of a sewing machine was new, but the idea was not new to the world. As early as 1790, Thomas Saint, an Englishman, took out a patent on a machine for "quilting, stitching, and sewing, and for making shoes, and other articles. . . ."

Saint's machine had some of the features of good sewing machines to-day. Notice the overhanging arm and the block-like plate on which to place the material to be sewed. The machine had an awl, to punch a hole in the goods. A needle, blunt and notched at the end, pushed a thread through the hole to form a loop on the under side of the material. Through this loop the needle, on next descending, passed a second loop to form a chain or crochet stitch. There was also a feed to move the goods along under the needle, a continuous thread, and stitch tighteners.

It is probable that by the time Saint finished his machine and secured his patent, he was too much discouraged to go on with it. It may be, too, that to make a living he had to take up other work, and before he got back to his invention, he became sick and died. Whatever the reason, for almost sixty years his machine lay unknown in the English patent office. The result was that scores of would-be inventors worked on sewing machines, only to miss the good points in his invention. When it was finally brought to light, people looked at Saint's machine with amazement, and wondered how so great an invention could have been so completely forgotten.

The chain stitch made by Saint's machine has one drawback. When a break in the thread is followed by a slight pull, the chain stitch unravels. This does not occur with the lock stitch. The lock stitch is made by two threads. These are interlaced in the middle of the fabric sewn, so as to form a neat stitch on both sides of the fabric.

The first sewing machine to make a lock stitch was invented by Walter Hunt of New York, about 1832. His machine had a curved needle with an eye at the point. The needle pierced the goods, and at the moment when it started out, a loop was formed in the thread; at that very same instant, a shuttle carrying a second thread passed through the loop, making the lock stitch.

Hunt was a gifted inventor. But either he thought little of his sewing machine, or he had other inventions which he thought promised greater and quicker profits. At any rate, he did not take the trouble to patent his machine, and proceeded to sell the model to a blacksmith for one hundred dollars. Even the blacksmith, after he had bought and paid for the model, made no use of it. Some twenty years afterwards, when Howe's lock stitch machine became famous, this old discarded model was dug out of a rubbish heap, and application was entered for a patent. The patent was denied. Hunt, like Trevithick before him, just failed to win one of the big industrial prizes of the century.