1846

Sewing Machine

Elias Howe (1819–1867)

By the 1850s, the textile industry had been revolutionized. The cotton gin plus cotton mills plus factories filled with power looms transformed the production of textiles—the process was thoroughly automated.

But the thing that had not changed was sewing. People with needles and thread still sewed garments together by hand. That was transformed with the advent of the lockstitch sewing machine, which appeared in the United States in an 1846 patent from inventor Elias Howe and then rapidly improved through the efforts of many inventors and engineers in the 1850s.

The key technology that had to be figured out was a machine that could produce a lockstitch—a seam that would not come undone if a person pulled on the thread. Singer sewing machines were the first to do this at a commercial scale in the 1850s.

The mechanism is as ingenious now as it was then. A needle with thread pokes through the fabric from the top. This forms a loop of thread below. Underneath the fabric, a hook catches the loop and then wraps it around a bobbin thread. Once released by the hook, the upper needle cinches up the loop and locks the stitch. A sewing machine can produce long, straight, strong seams ten times or more faster than a seamstress or tailor could by hand.

All of this technology came together with one other innovation at the time of the Civil War—standardized clothing sizes, which allowed for standard items of apparel to be mass-produced in factories.

Here is a way to understand the change that occurred in the marketplace. In the Revolutionary War, the Americans did not have a standard uniform. Soldiers brought their own clothes to the battlefield. There was no way for the army to afford uniforms because clothing was rare and expensive. By the Civil War, a typical soldier would receive from the army three pairs of pants, three shirts, two coats, a great coat, and various undergarments and socks. This was a cornucopia of clothing, all in standardized sizing, and it was made possible by the industrial revolution in textiles. Engineers and inventors had a massive effect on this marketplace.

SEE ALSO Power Loom (1784), Cotton Mill (1790), Cotton Gin (1794), Mass Production (1845).

An 1892 advertisement for Singer sewing machines, showing people in national costume using treadle machines.