Sewing Machine Day

What the day is

Sewing Machine Day is observed on June 13, marking a machine that had to abandon the way people actually sew before it could work at all.

Origin and background

Hand sewing pushes a single thread all the way through the fabric and back again, and no machine can do that at speed, because something has to release the needle on every stitch. The breakthrough was to stop imitating the hand altogether. A machine needle carries its eye at the point rather than the blunt end, so it only has to push through far enough to form a loop on the far side, and a second thread from a bobbin underneath passes through that loop. The two threads lock together in the middle of the fabric, which is why it is called a lockstitch, and nothing about it resembles hand sewing.

Elias Howe patented a practical version in 1846 and then spent years unable to profit from it while others built on the idea, Isaac Singer most successfully of all. The litigation that followed was savage enough to be remembered as the sewing machine war, and it ended in 1856 with something genuinely new: the main rivals pooled their patents and agreed to license the combination, with a royalty flowing to each of them. It is generally cited as the first patent pool, and the arrangement is now standard in industries where no single company owns every necessary piece.

Singer's more consequential invention was commercial rather than mechanical. Machines cost more than most households could pay at once, so his company sold them on installments, with a small deposit and monthly payments afterward. Consumer credit for an expensive durable good was close to unprecedented, and it put more machines into homes than any refinement of the mechanism.

The effect on labor ran both ways. It removed an enormous quantity of drudgery, and it also made large-scale garment manufacturing possible, with everything that came with it.

How to take part

• Look closely at a machine needle and find the eye at what seems the wrong end.
• Thread a bobbin and watch what the lockstitch is actually doing.
• Repair a garment instead of replacing it.
• Read about the 1856 patent pool if patents interest you at all.