Abstract
SEWING needles of bone date back to prehistoric times, and the steel needle made its first appearance in Britain in the sixteenth century. The speed of expert hand-sewing, thirty stitches per minute, is slow and laborious compared with that of machine work and with the ushering in of the mechanical age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is not surprising that the invention and development of the sewing machine should have come about early in this period. A chain-stitch machine with its single thread had already been made by B. Thimmonier, in 1830, and a machine produced by W. Hunt, in 1832–34, had an eye-pointed needle and an oscillating shuttle. It remained for Elias Howe to make and patent, in 1845, the first successful lock-stitch machine, in which an eye-pointed needle and an independent shuttle, each with its own thread, were used. He disposed of his English interests in the patent to William Frederick Thomas, of Cheapside, in whose name the British patent stands, dated December 1, 1846. The Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, is commemorating the occasion of the centenary by holding a small exhibition of sewing machines. Thanks to the generosity of Mr. A. W. Pickard, of Glasgow, the Museum has in its collection one of the first six of the 1846 type machines, which were made by Howe. A number of other machines of dates ranging over the complete century of development are shown. These include early Howe and also Wheeler and Wilson machines, while modern development is illustrated by the latest domestic and workroom models of the Singer Sewing Machine Co.
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Centenary of the Sewing Machine. Nature 158, 868 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158868a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158868a0