Weekly Trinity journal. [volume] (Weaverville, Calif.) 1857-1972, 1868-10-10
WEEKLY TRINITY JOURNAL
From the New York TrfbnheJ
,z,.. Howe. Jr the Inventor OF the Sew
fng-Machine.


xn,,ss Howe. Jr., the Inventor OF the sew
ing-Machfne.
One of the interesting objects in the present
.vh;bition of the New York Academy of Design,
i; the bust of Elias Howe, jr, the inventor of the
sewinp-machine, executed by Ellis. Frequent
ora of Broadway will not need to turn TO the
catalogue when they pause before this work, for
the faithful chisel of the artist has reproduced
those peculiarities which reader Mr. Howe one
of the marked men Of the street. Nothing is
wanting to complete the portrait but to cover
that mass of Oympian curls with a steeple-
crown hat, such as we see in pictures of Crom-
WELLS Roundheads, and of the Puritan fathers of
New England. The exhibition of this bust is
well-tmed. An article appears in the atlantic
Monthly for May, which relates in considerable
detail the strange history of the invention which
has rendered Elias Howe benefactor to man
kind Mr.. Ellis shows the public, and will show
posterity, how Mr.. Howe looks, and Mr.. Parton
tells US in the atlantic why he is worth looking
at.
BY the side o. a mll-stream, in an old town of
Massachusetts,, where his father was a farmer
and miller, Elias Howe was born in 1919. There
was a vein of inventive ingenuity in the family
one of the uncles of Elias invented successful
machine for splitting palm leaf into strips for
straw hats, and the family could point to other
ingenious devices originated among themselves.
Elias Howe spent his boyhood in assisting his
father in the culture of lis farm and the running
of his mills and he self-supporting indi-
vidual, as Yankee boys usually are,
he could Zach high enough to Jet down the bars
for the cattle At sixteen, the family nest being
overcrowded, the youth went to Lowell, where
he found employment in a machine shop and at
twenty, was journeyman machinist in Boston,
earning SIS week.
1t was in shop in Cornhill, Boston, twenty
seven years ago. that the idea of sewing by ma
infn he act hra IF
future inventor. While he and the other men of
the shop were gathered about an incomplete knit
ting machine, in conversation with the proprie-
tor the master of the shop said, in a careless
way, Why do you bother yourselves with a
knitting machine? Why not make a sewing
machine?' To which the proprietor of the
knitting apparatus replied, % You make sewing
machine, and I will insure you an independent
fortune" This conversation, in which Elias
Howe took no part, and which was imm ediately
forgotten by all but him, made deep impression
upon his mind, and led him to habitua rehec-
tion upon the puzzling problem which it sug-
gested. 1t was not, however, until three or four
years had elapsed, and the charge of growing
family pressed heavily upon frame unequal to
the arduous labors of machnist that he set
himself seriously to the task of inventing sew
ing-machine.
Helped to a little capital by old schoolmate,
he shut himself in garnet at Cambridge, in De-
tempt to put into steel and brass the clear con-
ception of sewing-machine which had been
gradually formed in his mind. Never was n first
attempt at an invention of the first class more
successful. In April, 1915, his machine sewed
stitches; in May, it up seams at the rate of
two hundred and fifty stitches minute-eight
times faster than they are usually sewed by
hand In July, two complete suits of cloth
clothes were made upon the machine, which was
soon after publicly exhibited at Boston, and
patented. That identical first sewing machine,
just as Elias Howe finished it in 1915, is now in
the iron safe of the Howe Machine Company's
establishment in Broadway, and has recently
sewed at the rate of three hundred stitches a
minute, and sewed as WE'LL though not SO fast as
the most improved machine in existence.
The trials of the inventor in getting his inven-
ton before the public were long and severe.
The whole body of journeymen taiors opposed
it. and after two years of effort not one machine
had been sold. Mr.. Howe, desparing of success
in his own country, attempted England. During
his two years residence in London he was re-
duced to such an extreme OF poverty that be SUBJ
sisted for while on beans alone, purchased
with borrowed money and cooked by himself;
and when his wife was about to return to Amer
lea she was compelled to leave behind part of
her own clothes because there was money to
pay the washerwoman.
It was nine years after the completion of the
first machine before the invention yielded sub
sistence to the inventor, during Wnicn ne dls-
played extraordinary perseverance and fortitude.
Great has been HIS reward. Improved by the
admirable devices of Wilson and others, the
American sewing-machine has become universal /;
it is employed in every civilized country, and is
to-day doing the work of millions of hands. 1t
is computed that there now made in the
United States every working day of the year, one
thousand sewing-machines One of great
manufacturers published list of thirty-nine of
the principal cities of the world in which sup
plies of his machines regularly kept, and
other owned sewing machine establishments in
twenty-four cities. 1t is not unusual for the
leading makers, such the Howe Machine Com
pany, Wheeler Wilson, Singer Company,
Grover & Baker, and Wilcox l. Gibbs, to sell
three hundred and fifty machines in a single
day
These arc wonderful feats. The wonder grows
upon when consider that all this prodigi-
Gus addition to the working force Of mankind
this substantial and universal good which at
once enriches and honors the nation-has sprung
in twenty years from thought in the mind of an
American mechanic, patiently elaborated in
garnet, and heroically chung to till the world
WAS compelled to appreciate it,