essays about sewing machines

All operations continued to be performed by hand until factory production of cloth was made possible by the invention of foot- and water-powered machinery for spinning and weaving in the 18th century. This development in turn stimulated the invention of the sewing machine. An early sewing machine was designed and manufactured by Barthélemy Thimonnier of France in 1841 to mass-produce uniforms for the French Army, but rioting tailors destroyed the machines. Thimonnier's design, in any event, merely mechanized the hand-sewing operation; a decisive improvement was embodied in a sewing machine built by Walter Hunt of New York City in about 1832-34 but never patented, and independently by Elias Howe of Spencer, Mass., and patented in 1846. In both machines a curved eye-pointed needle moved in an arc as it carried the thread through the fabric, on the other side of which it interlocked with a second thread carried by a shuttle running back and forth on a track. Howe's highly successful mach...