Who invented sewing needles

She had done prior work for General George Washington, and she impressed a secret committee from the First Continental Congress with her ability to craft a five-pointed star with the right folds and one snip of the scissors.

In late May or early June of , she finished sewing the first American flag. Though his machine was never built, a London cabinetmaker successfully patented a crude sewing machine in Thomas Saint also built plans for his machine, which were not discovered until the s. It would not work without modification, but it was an important step on the road to the sewing machine.

It is only after several able inventors have failed in attempt, that someone with the mental power to combine the efforts of others with his own, at last produces a machine that is practicable. Sewing machines are no exception to this. In , The Waterbury Button Company began mass producing brass buttons for American military uniforms.

Brass buttons were a strong commodity throughout the s, and are still used in sewing to this day. As a nation used to luxury goods, they soon found themselves in quite a bind. The Clark family came up with a way to twist cotton threads together, producing an excellent thread for sewing. Their thread was the first such material mass produced for sewing, in fact. England, and the rest of the world, appreciated their efforts.

In , Barthelemy Thimonnier was awarded a patent by the French government for his sewing machine. Though he initially imagined an embroidery machine, he found its true purpose as a sewing machine. It was practical and efficient , used a barbed needle, and was built almost entirely out of wood. At some point, he had a factory running with 80 machines.

He also sold his sewing machines for commercial use, and ran one of the first-ever garment factories, throughout his tumultuous life. Reportedly, Thimonnier never fully recovered from the after-effects of the riot. In or , according to some accounts , prolific American inventor Walter Hunt created the first lockstitch sewing machine. On the other side of the fabric, a loop was made while a second thread, carried by a shuttle, ran on a track and passed back through the loop.

Surviving pointers - their life expectancy was under thirty-five years - earned a guinea a day, and long resisted not only mechanization but also dust exhaust equipment that would have reduced their wages as well as their mortality. Nor were risks limited to the needle workshops and factories. To inhibit rust, eighteenth-century needles were at least in France sometimes packed in asbestos powder before the mineral was known to cause lung cancer.

The nineteenth century was the golden age of needle production. Higher disposable incomes, the new profusion of textiles, the introduction of the sewing machine, and the rise of world trade with the steamship and the British Empire all expanded markets as new machinery expanded capacity.

The rule of thumb was that a nation bought three to four hand-sewing needles per year per household. Needles were now cheap enough to be lost in great numbers. By , Scientific American reported an annual production of 3 million needles per day worldwide, with million purchased each year in the United States alone. Most hand-sewing needles sold in the United States were British-made; Americans never attempted to challenge British dominance of needlemaking.

The needle industry shared the nineteenth century's enthusiasm for variety and details of finish, including gold-plated grooves. Tailors, seamstresses, and home sewers could choose from twelve sizes of "sharps," the most common style, which generally had grooved eyes to keep protruding thread from damaging fabric.

There were also nine sizes of "blunts," short and thick needles for fast, uniform stitching by tailors, and a range of "betweens. For most styles and sizes there was also a range of quality and packaging. On better grades, grooved eyes were gold plated. Threading along with corrosion and injury risk has long been the Achilles heel of needle design. Major nineteenth-century patents attempted to substitute tactile cues for visual hit-or-miss.

The Calyx-Eye was open at the top, with two angled prongs that yielded temporarily to gentle pressure on the thread but retained it securely thereafter. Other innovations, like the Eigo and the Filtenax, guided users in threading from the side of the needle or opening the top with the thumbnail. At its peak in the late nineteenth century, the Redditch needle industry was producing fully 90 percent of the world's needs.

But challenges were growing. A later reproduction of Saint's invention based on his patent drawings did not work. In , German, Balthasar Krems invented the automatic machine for sewing caps.

Krems did not patent his invention, and it never functioned well. Austrian tailor, Josef Madersperger made several attempts at inventing the machine for sewing and was issued a patent in All of his efforts were considered unsuccessful. In , a French patent was granted to Thomas Stone and James Henderson for "a machine that emulated hand sewing. Their machine failed to sew any useful amount of fabric before malfunctioning.

The first functional sewing machine was invented by the French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in Thimonnier's machine used only one thread and a hooked needle that made the same chain stitch used with embroidery.

The inventor was almost killed by an enraged group of French tailors who burned down his garment factory because they feared unemployment as a result of his sewing machine invention.

In , Walter Hunt built America's first somewhat successful sewing machine. He later lost interest in patenting because he believed his invention would cause unemployment. Hunt's machine could only sew straight steams. Hunt never patented and in , the first American patent was issued to Elias Howe for "a process that used thread from two different sources.

Elias Howe's machine had a needle with an eye at the point. The needle was pushed through the cloth and created a loop on the other side; a shuttle on a track then slipped the second thread through the loop, creating what is called the lockstitch. However, Elias Howe later encountered problems defending his patent and marketing his invention.

For the next nine years, Elias Howe struggled, first to enlist interest in his machine, then to protect his patent from imitators. His lockstitch mechanism was adopted by others who were developing innovations of their own.

Isaac Singer invented the up-and-down motion mechanism, and Allen Wilson developed a rotary hook shuttle. Sewing machines did not go into mass production until the s when Isaac Singer built the first commercially successful machine. Singer built the first sewing machine where the needle moved up and down rather than the side-to-side, and a foot treadle powered the needle. Previous machines were all hand-cranked.

However, Isaac Singer's machine used the same lockstitch that Howe had patented. Elias Howe sued Isaac Singer for patent infringement and won in Other needles made of bone and ivory have been discovered in Slovenia, Liaoning, China, and Russia, dating back to between 45, and 30, years ago.

The first needle with an eyelet dates to around 25, years ago. Although these artifacts originated in varying climates and cultures, they point to a time when modern humans were evolving away from their evolutionary ancestors. Armenian copper needles, for example, which date to around 7, BCE, mark the development of metal harnessing, a major development in human technology.