THE SEWING MACHINE

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 50, Issue 267, 25 August 1930, Page 7

THE SEWING MACHINE

THE TRAGEDY OF ITS INVENTOR The first of the sewing machines—made exactly one hundred years ago—is now being exhibited in Paris. Its history is interesting.. The story of its inventor is pathetic, if not tragic. His name was Barthelemy Tliimonnier. His father, a dyer by trade, apprenticed him to a tailor in the neighbourhood of Lyon. He observed the women) there at their crochet work; and occurred to him that perhaps a machine could be made to do what they were doing, and to do it six times as fast. He neglected Ins tailoring—he had been set up in a small tailor’s shop at Saint Etienne in order to follow up his idea, in spite of the sneers of his family, who told him that he was mad to “try to sew breeches otherwise than in the way.mi which they had been sewn since the invention of needles, thread and thimble.” , . . . By 1829 he had succeeded in making a practicable machine. A friend at the Saint Etienne School of Mines niade the necessary drawings and provided the necessary money to enable hnn to take out a patent. He took out his patent, went to Paris and there formed a company. His establishment was in the Rue de Sevres. He was prepared to make military uniforms, and had 80 sewing machines ready to be used for that purpose. Fortune seemed to be smiling on him. And then—catastrophe.. He launched his enterprise at an inconvenient time. There had just been a revolution, and there was a great deal of unemployment. The workmen feared that this rationalisation would add to the number of unemployed. They rioted. Tw hundred of them stormed the workshop, smashed up all the 80 sewing machines in it, and so terrified Thimonnier by their threats that he ran away. The fact that 75 of them were arrested and sent to prison did not help him; and the result of the riot was to postpone the use or sewing machines for a quarter of . a century, and to give the first material benefit of the invention to England and America. With one sewing machine—the original model—on his back, but without 1 a penny in his pocket, Thimonnier went back to his trade, his home, and his wife. He paid his expenses as be went by exhibiting his model m the inns, and then sending round the hat. Subsequently in the intervals of tailoring he made a few more machines and sold them at £2 each to such of his neighbours as lie could persuade to buy them. . , . . Fifteen years or so later he took one of his machines to London, where, it attracted some attention, and induced the “Morning Post” to predict that i would supersede hard sewing, but he did not live to see the prediction fulfilled, and died insolvent in Lsot, leaving his family destitute. In 1872 an appeal was made to the French Government on behalf of his widow; and the Minister of the Interior, after careful investigation of the case, bestowed upon her the munificent gratuity of £l2.