INVENTOR'S TRAGEDY

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 47, 23 August 1930, Page 26

INVENTOR'S TRAGEDY

FIRST SEWING MACHINE LED TO RIOT

The first of the sewing machines — made exactly 100 years ago, is now being exhibited-in Paris, says the "Observer." Its history is interesting, of its inventor is tragic. His name was Barthelemy Thimon-/ Bier. 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, ana it 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 his tailoringlie 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 jvas maa to "try to sew breeches btherwise than in the way in which they had been sewn since the invention bf needles, thread, and thimbles." 'By 1829 he had succeeded in making a practicable machine. A friend at the Saint Etienne School of Mines made the necessary drawings and provided the necessary money to enable him to take out a patent. He took out his patent, went to Paris, and there formed a company. ' His establishment was in, the Bue oe 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 had launched his enterprise at an Inconvenient time. There had just been 4 revolution, and there was a great peal of unemployment. The workman

feared that this development would add to the number of the unemployed. They rioted. Two hundred of them stormed the workshop, smashed up all the eighty sewing machines in it, and so terrified'Thimonnior' by their threats that ho 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 of sewing machines for a quarter of a century, and to givo the first material benefit of the invention, to England and America, With one sewing machine —the original model—on his back, but without a penny in his pocket, Thimonnier went back to his trade, his home, and his wife. He paid' his' expenses, as he went, by exhibiting his model in 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 he 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 it would supersede hand sewing, but he did not live to see the prediction fulfilled, and died, insolvent, in 1857, 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 tho munificent gratuity of £12.