Elias Howe

Elias Howe grew up the son of a Spencer, Massachusetts doctor and started work early, apprenticed to a Lowell textile mill at fifteen. The Panic of 1837 closed the mills, and he moved to Cambridge to repair carding machinery, then in 1838 apprenticed under Ari Davis, a mechanic who built chronometers and other precision instruments for a living. It was in Davis's shop that Howe first thought seriously about a machine that could sew. He married Elizabeth Jennings Ames in 1841, and the couple had three children over the next five years while he chased the idea on borrowed time and other men's money.

On September 10, 1846, Howe patented the machine that became the industry's basis: a needle with the eye at its point, a shuttle working beneath the cloth, an automatic feed. No American would finance it, so his brother Amasa carried a machine to England and sold it for two hundred fifty pounds. Howe joined him there in 1848 and came home in 1849 nearly broke after the deal soured. His wife died not long after. What saved him was litigation. From 1849 to 1854 he fought Isaac Singer's copy of his lockstitch through the courts, won, and collected royalties on machines sold under other men's names. By the time he founded the Howe Machine Company in Bridgeport in 1865, the man who could not sell his own invention was among the richest manufacturers in the country.

Howe was not, in fact, first. A New Yorker named Walter Hunt had built a working lockstitch machine more than a decade earlier and never patented it, worried the device would throw seamstresses out of work. Howe patented his version, and when Isaac Singer built a machine using the same stitch, the courts sided with the patent over the market. Most of Howe's eventual fortune came from royalties paid by men who actually manufactured and sold the machines, not from doing so himself. He had another chance at that kind of money in 1851, when he patented an "automatic, continuous clothing closure," an early version of the zipper, and never troubled to develop it. The sewing machine had already made him rich enough.

Howe died on October 3, 1867, at forty-eight, of gout and a blood clot, and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. His second wife, Rose Halladay, joined him there when she died in 1890. He and Singer, once courtroom enemies, ended up on the same short list of self-made millionaires that industrial-era Massachusetts and New York kept producing. The country waited seventy-three years to put him on a postage stamp, in 1940, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame did not induct him until 2004, more than a century after the machine carrying his patent number had become furniture in nearly every American household.

Elias Howe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Lockstitch sewing machine (U.S. Patent 4,750) patent
  Needle with the eye at the point, a shuttle, and an automatic feed 1846
• Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure patent
  An early ancestor of the zipper, never developed commercially 1851
• Howe Sewing Machine Company company
  Run by his brother Amasa and later his son Benjamin 1854
• Howe Machine Company company
  Founded in Bridgeport, Connecticut — gold medal at the 1867 Paris Exposition 1865

• July 9, 1819 aged 0 Born in Spencer, Massachusetts
• 1838 aged ~19 Apprentices under Ari Davis in Cambridge and first considers a sewing machine
• March 3, 1841 aged 21 Marries Elizabeth Jennings Ames
• September 10, 1846 aged 27 Patents the lockstitch sewing machine
• 1848 aged ~29 Joins his brother in London to try to sell the machine
• 1849 aged ~30 Returns to America broke — his wife dies soon after
• 1854 aged ~35 Wins his patent suit against Isaac Singer after five years in court
• August 14, 1862 aged 43 Enlists in the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry
• October 3, 1867 aged 48 Dies in Brooklyn at 48

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