Tribute to hard-working friends

Press, 20 April 1982, Page 14

Tribute to hard-working friends

Collecting with

Myrtle Duff

Many collectors have been inspired by thoughts of fine porcelain or silver tastefully displayed continuing to give pleasure long after the first thrill of obtaining them has subsided.

Not so many contemplate with joy the thought, of a row of old sewing machines, but there are enthusiasts who seek these old friends which have made an unprecedented and as yet unsurpassed contribution to our modern standards of living. Perhaps we should all have at least, one early model enshrined in a place of honour somewhere.

From the time when primitive people used sharpened bones to pierce holes in pieces of skin then pushed strips of vine or fibre through the holes in each piece to fasten them together until the invention of the sewing machine, the only other significant invention to facilitate. the process was when a hole was bored in the bone to transform the skewer into a needle. This enabled the thread to pass through the hole at the same time as the point of the implement punctured the material.

Sewing remained at this stage, except that metal needles replaced those of bone or wood, for thousands of years.

Then, in 1755, Charles F. Weinsenthal, a German living in London, was granted British patent No. 701 for a two pointed needle to be used for embroidery.

Weinsenthal had stumbled upon the importance of placing an eye at the point of the

needle, but he failed to develop the idea and there is no evidence that it was ever used commercially. In July, 1790, British Patent No. 1764 records an invention by a cabinet-maker, Thomas Saint, of a machine described as “An Entire New Method of making and completing shoes, boots, splatterdashes, Clogs and Other Articles by means of tools and machines.” But again, no record is reported of its ever having been manufactured. When I read this, statement by Grace Rogers Cooper, Curator of Textiles at the Smithsonian Institution, I was a little puzzled as I had. a distinct memory of haying seen a machine by Thomas Saint on exhibition at the Science Museum in South Kensington.

However, I note that Grace Cooper also states that a certain Newton Wise, of London, in 1874, constructed a model from Saint’s patent description, so perhaps it was this which I remember seeing in London. She also reports that Wise found it necessary to make many modifications before his model could be made to work, which perhaps explains why the original design failed to reach the assembly line. It seems to have been a French tailor, Barthelemy Thimmonier, who invented the first real working sewing machine.

He obtained a patent in 1830 for a machine with a crochet hook type of,needle. This descended through the cloth and brought up a loop of thread, which it carried through the previously made loop, forming a chain on the surface.

As many as eighty of Thimmonier’s rather clumsy, wooden machines were

known to have been in use in Paris in 1841, making army clothing. But as always when workers fear the loss of employment on which they depend for their livelihood, there was great fear and hatred of the new machines.

They were eventually completely destroyed by a crowd of anxious and desperate workers, who nearly succeeded in killing the inventor himself. Thimmonier went on to make the improved metal version of his machine which

was patented in Britain and exhibited at the great exhibition of 1851, but for some reason attracted little attention.

It was in America that the great breakthrough came with the idea of an evepointed needle and a double thread or lock stitch. This has continued to be the basis for all sewing machines right up to today's electronically operated, push-button types which do everything right down to the last button and button-hole.

Walter Hunt, of New York, was first in the field with this new version of the eyepointed needle. Together with a blacksmith called Arrowsmith, to whom he eventually sold his invention, he made many mechanical improvements.

However, he seems to have delayed applying for a patent, and when he eventually did so his claim was disallowed.

It is to Elias Howe, who had been working independently in Massachusettes. that the invention of the modern sewing machine is usually attributed. He patented his machine in 1846, and eventually sold it in England to William F. Thomas of Cheapside, London, a corset manufacturer.

Thomas secured an English patent in his own name, and set the inventor to work to improve the machine for him on a weekly wage. Howe eventually returned to America. Having learned from his experiences in England, he began to reassert his

rights to his patent there. After long and expensive litigation in which even the powerful Isaac Merritt Singer featured, he succeeded. and eventually obtained royalties of not less than $2 million — not much by today’s standards perhaps, but a considerable fortune in those days.

He was to achieve posthumously an honour he could never have foreseen when in the mid-twentieth century a group known as the Beatles dedicated their film “Help” to “Elias Howe, Inventor of the Sewing Machine.” I suppose many readers will have grown up with the same belief that I held as a child that “Singer" was just another name for a sewing machine.

I did not even realise that it was a person’s name, but thought it referred to the pleasant humming sound emanating from the machine as my mother’s feet worked the treadle.

Singer machines seem to have dominated the New Zealand market for a few decades, but the earliest models brought to this country were certainly not all Singers. There were Wheeler and Wilson, Jones', and many other brands, all producing numbers of models. In this golden- age of sewing machine invention N.ew Zealand even had. its own participants, including one who named his own particular version "The Canterbury.” I was unable to locate an early advertisement featur r ing this model, but have included an advertisement from the “Southern Provinces Almanac” of 1879 which gives some indication of the importance of these mechanical sewers at that time.

I think few mothers would care to keep house and bring up a family even today without the indispensible sewing machine, though whether-to-day’s electronic wonders will have the .same appeal for collectors remains to be seen.

There are always numbers of old machines available in all the local curiosity shops but few as old as those on display at the Canterbury Museum, which include an “Aginora," one of the first lock-stitch types to be bought in Christchurch. It belonged to Miss Fanny

Coster, of Harewood, who used it continuously until the 19305.

Another interesting survival is a chainstitch machine used by Mrs Arthur Cole, who arrived in the “Egmont" in 1856 to do all the sewing for her large family.

There is also one example bearing the famous name “Howe," which was brought to New Zealand by Margaret Stevenson, later Mrs Lyttle, of North Canterbury.