The Age of Invention, page 69 by Holland Thompson
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ccentric maker and repairer of fine machinery. Here the young mechanic heard of the desirability of a sewing machine and began to puzzle over the problem. Many an inventor before him had attempted to make sewing machines and some had just fallen short of success. Thomas Saint, an Englishman, had patented one fifty years earlier; and about this very time a Frenchman named Thimmonier was working eighty sewing machines making army uniforms, when needle workers of Paris, fearing that the bread was to be taken from them, broke into his workroom and destroyed the machines. Thimmonier tried again, but his machine never came into general use. Several patents had been issued on sewing machines in the United States, but without any practical result. An inventor named Walter Hunt had discovered the principle of the lock-stitch and had built a machine but had wearied of his work and abandoned his invention, just as success was in sight. But Howe knew nothing of any of these inventors. There is no evidence that he had ever seen the work of another.
The idea obsessed him to such an extent that he could do no other work, and yet he must live. By this time he was married and had children, and his wages were only nine dollars a week. Just then an old schoolmate, George Fisher, agreed to support his family and furnish him with five hundred dollars for materials and tools. The attic in Fisher's house in Cambridge was Howe's workroom. His first efforts were failures, but all at once the idea of the lock-stitch came to him. Previously all machines (except Hunt's, which was unknown, not having even been patented) had used the chainstitch, wasteful of thread and easily unraveled. The two threads of the lockstitch cross in the materials joined together, and the lines of stitches
show the same on both sides. In short, the chainstitch is a crochet or knitting stitch, while the lockstitch is a weaving stitch. Howe had been working at night and was on his way home, gloomy and despondent, when this idea dawned on his mind, prob