Who Patented the Sewing Machine?
First sewing machine
The first sewing machine was patented by Thomas Saint, London on 17th July 1790. The first sewing machine to be produced commercially was constructed in prototype form by Barthelemy Thimmonier, a poor tailor of Amplepuis, a Rhone village, in 1829. Two years later he received an order for 80 machines from a Paris clothing factory making military uniforms, and was taken on the staff as supervisor and mechanic. The experiment seems to have been only too successful, for the tailors, seeing Thimmonier’s machines as a threat to their livelihood, incited a mob to destroy them. One model survived, and this Thimmonier carried back to Amplepuis, walking all the way and exhibiting the machine as a sideshow curiosity to earn a few sous.
For the next few years Thimmonier eked out a precarious existence by selling handmade wooden sewing machines.
In Britain, Elias Howe of Spencer, Mass., who patented a lock-stitch machine in 1846, disposed of his British rights the same year to William Thomas, a corset manufacturer of Cheapside, for the sum of £ 250. At the same time Howe went to work for Thomas, manufacturing the first British-built sewing machines for use in his employer’s own business.
The first Domestic Sewing Machine was manufactured by Isaac Merritt Singer at Harvard Place, Boston in 1851. This was to become the first universally accepted labour-saving device for the home, invading virtually every middle class household in Europe and America within the following two or three decades. In 1889 the Singer Manufacturing Co. produced the first electrically driven sewing machine at their plant at Elizabethport, N.J., but there was little demand before mains electricity became widespread in the 1920s.
