TECHNOLOGIES OF SEWING ©2014 Sara J. Schechner

Sewing, the act of joining two things with stitches of thread, is a technology that is so

pervasive to our modern lives that we seldom take notice of it. Most of our garments, shoes, handbags, knapsacks, bed linens, curtains, upholstered furniture, pillows, towels, car seats, suit cases, table cloths, tents, sleeping bags, hats, umbrellas, flags, and rugs are sewn. I am sure you can name many other sewn things. Sewing can be simple and rudimentary or decorative and embellished. For some people, it is work; for others, a pastime. Still others rarely perform the act of sewing themselves, but readily make use of goods sewn by others.

This essay explores the history of technologies of sewing as a companion to the Tangible Things HarvardX unit on “An Orphan Sewing Machine.” HAND SEWING Before the invention of the sewing machine, people sewed with needle and thread. Prehistoric sewing needles were made of bone or thorns. The thread was plant fiber or sinew. Today needles are made of steel wire plated with nickel and gold to prevent corrosion. Threads are made of twisted cotton, silk, wool, or polyester. Whatever the materials, the technology was very stable over thousands of years: The needles were slender and pointed, and the flexible thread was inserted through an aperture (the “eye”) at the opposite end from the point. [Fig. 1]

Figure 1. Traditional needle and thread.

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It took time and practice to learn to sew well by hand, to make uniform stitches and avoid tangled thread. In the home, girls were taught to sew so that they could fashion and repair clothing, bed covers, and other household fabric goods. Sewing seams and hemming garments were tedious domestic jobs (although many artists have given us lovely images of women at their needlework). To the rescue came the sewing clamp in the early nineteenth century. Made of brass, bronze, or iron, the sewing clamp was attached to the edge of a table and served as a third hand. The clamp secured one edge of the fabric so that the seamstress could pull it taut with her left hand and hold her needle in her right. [Fig. 2] The clamps came in many varieties, but best loved were those shaped as birds.

Figure 2. Seated woman sewing with a "third hand." Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), Edo, Japan. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

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The sewing bird was a C-clamp with a bird on top. The lower body of the bird was fixed to the clamp, while the upper body was hinged and had a spring under the tail. When the outer end of the tail was pressed down towards the fixed lower body, the bird’s beak opened, permitting the seamstress to insert an edge of fabric in the beak. When she released the tail, the beak snapped closed, securing the fabric, which was then pulled taut for seaming or hemming. Often the sewing bird had a pin cushion below it, looking like a plump nest. On its back, the bird sometimes carried an emery ball for polishing needles.

The first American sewing bird was patented on February 15, 1853 by Charles Waterman of Meridan, Connecticut, but the product was already in circulation a year earlier. Sewing birds were advertised in 1852 in The Constitution, a Hartford newspaper, as an item that ladies of “good sense” would want:

By the help of this little instrument a lady may sit erect while going on with her work, and thus avoid those very common complaints, a crooked spine and a weak chest.—The Sewing Bird is a beautiful little thing, highly ornamental to any parlor table, and may be supposed to be an entertaining companion for a solitary hour.

Another advertisement showed two women, one hunched over her work and the other with good posture. [Fig. 3] According to Waterman’s daughter, the inventor had hoped “to make sewing a little easier for the ladies.”

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Figure 3. Advertisement in the Connecticut Courant, Sept 9, 1852.

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The cute sewing clamps were a big success for the next fifty years. They were made in many styles out of brass or iron. Some were gilt, silver-plated, or painted. [Figure 4]

Figure 4. Variety of sewing birds in the Textile Collection of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

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MACHINE SEWING Starting in the late eighteenth century, many people saw the advantages of having a mechanical device to aid the sewing of fabric or leather. Early designs included an overhanging arm, a stitching awl, and a feed mechanism to push material under the awl. Most of the designs used a chain stitch—a series of looped stitches formed by a single thread—to join the fabric. The chain stitch, however, was easily unraveled and not durable. Few of the early designs ever reached a production stage, but notable was the sewing machine invented by Barthélemy Thimonnier, a French tailor in 1829. In 1830, he patented his device, and with partners, built a factory to produce uniforms for the French army. Tailors, however, are said to have burnt down the factory soon after.

In 1846 Elias Howe patented the first machine in the United States that sewed a durable stitch and could be factory made in quantity. Howe’s machine had these distinct features:

• Above the fabric, a sewing needle whose eye was located near its point. Thread from a spool passed through the eye.

• Beneath the fabric, a shuttle carrying a bobbin wound with a second thread. Oscillation of the shuttle caused the bobbin thread to loop around the top thread passing through the needle.

• An automatic feed. Howe’s machine sewed a lockstitch—a stitch formed by interlocking the top and bottom threads within the seam. [Figure 5] The lockstitch was much more secure than the chain stitch on earlier sewing machines.

Figure 5. Cross section of the lockstitch. The white thread unwinds from the spool on top of the machine and passes through the eye of the needle. The red thread comes from the bobbin underneath the machine. Animations of the lockstitch mechanism can be seen here.

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Howe’s idea for a bobbin carried in a shuttle that traveled back and forth in a straight line (illustrated in the patent drawing, Figure 7) may have been inspired by his experience as a boy working in the textile factories of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1835-1837. The power looms in the Lowell mills used what were known as flying shuttles to carry the weft threads through the shed of warp threads row by row. These shuttles were boat-shaped pieces of wood that held a long and skinny bobbin wound with thread. [Figure 6]

Figure 6. An early flying shuttle.

Figure 7. Howe's patent drawing for his sewing machine, 1846, shows the shuttle (red) carrying the bobbin (blue) under the sewing table.

Another bit of inspiration may have come from Howe’s association with the firm of

Daniel Davis, Jr. in Boston. During the financial panic of 1837, Howe had lost his mill job and had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1838 he started working in the Boston shop of Ari and Daniel Davis, Jr., two brothers who made and repaired scientific instruments. The Davis firm was something of an invention factory that produced many models of electromagnetic machines and engines. [Figure 8] It was during Howe’s employment with Davis that he came

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up with the idea for his lockstitch sewing machine [Figure 9], and his design has similarities to the Davis machines.

Figure 8. Reciprocating engine model by Daniel Davis, Jr, Boston, 1848. Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. To see an animation of this engine, click here. To see other examples of the Davis firm output, click here.

Figure 9. Sewing machine of Elias Howe, Boston, 1846.

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Howe patented his sewing machine in 1846, and traveled to England to get financing for production. He returned to the U.S. in 1849 nearly penniless to discover Isaac Singer and others infringing on his patent. Between 1849 and 1854, Howe sued Singer, and eventually won the right to loyalties.

So what did Isaac Singer bring to the table? Superior marketing. Singer’s first machines

used the transverse shuttle of Howe. Later Singer adopted the vibrating shuttle, which moved along a short arc in reciprocating fashion. The credit for this mechanism goes to Allen B. Wilson, who invented it in 1850 [Figure 10], but it was Singer who made it a great commercial success. The vibrating shuttle design was used in the 1902 Singer Model 27 VS2 machine featured in the Tangible Things course.

Figure 10. Vibrating shuttle in patent sewing machine by Allen B. Wilson, 1850.

This little essay started with a description of the hand sewing needle, and it is appropriate to close with remarks on the anatomy of a machine sewing needle. [Figs. 11-12] The sewing machine needle is a complex instrument, although few people ever notice how it is constructed. The needle has a long groove on one side for the thread to hide as the downward-moving needle pierces the fabric. On its other side, just above the eye, the needle has a notch (called the “scarf”) over which the thread passes. As the needle moves upward, the friction between the thread and fabric causes the thread to bow out at this notch. It is at this moment that the shuttle noses its way through the gap, thereby hooking the needle thread and causing it to interlock with the thread coming from the bobbin inside the shuttle.

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Figures 11-12. Anatomy of a machine sewing needle and thread placement during a stitch. Courtesy of http://www.ismacs.net/needle_and_shank/how-to-correctly-orient-a-sewing-machine-needle.html and http://blog.fabricmartfabrics.com/2013/01/resource-library-choosing-right-needle.html.

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From hand to machine sewing, the technological story can lead us along many threads: from women’s work, health, and status to time-saving devices; from the cottage industry of tailors to labor issues brought on by industrialized, mechanized sewing; from technical ideas and schemes that “go nowhere” to patents and lawsuits; from plant and animal fibers to cloth and threads. And so the list goes on.