Isaac Merritt Singer: How a Sewing Machine Alone Built America's First Multinational | This Is How Our Lives Were Designed

He was an inventor, but he had no dream of changing the world. His story begins with the redesign of a sewing machine, and what came of it touches every one of us.

Isaac Merritt Singer's life turned around in 1851.

That year, at exactly 40, he founded a company bearing his own name: I.M. Singer & Company. It made a single product, the sewing machine, but in the near-century that followed, the company would not only build a mass market for home sewing machines but also become America's first multinational, selling 100 million Singer machines around the world, with the instructions translated into at least 54 languages. To this day, in many languages, "singer" still means sewing machine.

From the second half of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, wherever there was sewing to be done, a Singer machine could do it.

The Wright brothers used their mother's Singer to sew the fabric for their glider wings. Tsar Alexander III bought a batch of Singer machines to make 250,000 army tents. The polar explorer Richard Evelyn Byrd took six Singer machines with him to Antarctica and called them "absolutely essential."

Set in a larger historical frame, the Singer sewing machine mattered even more than the spinning jenny.

Don Bissell, author of The First Conglomerate: 145 Years of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, argues that the Singer machine held the same place in the textile trade that Henry Ford's Model T held in the car industry. Or, as James Parton put it in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867 — with some exaggeration — one of its meanings for the hardworking laborer was that "it enables him to dress as well as a millionaire."

But before Singer set to work on the sewing machine, all of this was still a long way off.

Singer did not invent the sewing machine. The first true sewing machine was built in 1790 by the Englishman Thomas Saint, and it could do the most basic work of piercing and threading. But the chain of stitches made with a single thread was not tight: if the thread broke partway through, every stitch sewn before it came undone.

Not until 1832 did the American inventor Walter Hunt make a real breakthrough. He broke with earlier inventors' stubborn insistence on copying hand sewing, moved the eye of the needle from the tail end to the point, and used two separate threads to sew cloth: the needle carried the first thread through the fabric, and as it rose again a loop appeared underneath; a second thread, strung on a horizontal shuttle, passed through that loop, and once the shuttle returned to its place, a far sturdier lockstitch formed on its own.

But the fear of the time that sewing machines would throw every tailor out of work made Hunt give up his patent application. Years later the Boston businessman Elias Howe Jr., working on his own, built a machine much like Hunt's, and in 1846 he won a patent for a two-thread lockstitch sewing machine. His machine, though, never went into mass production.

The root problem was not the public mood. It was the flaws in the machines themselves.

The Blodgett sewing machine that Singer came across in a Boston workshop in 1850 was advanced for its day, and it still broke thread now and then and tangled it as it turned.

At first Singer had no interest in the sewing machine at all. He had merely borrowed that workshop from the machinist Orson Phelps to show printers and publishers a carving machine of his own invention. Nobody wanted to buy it. The $3,000 put in by his only backer, George Zieber, was gone, and Singer himself was down to nothing.

At Phelps's suggestion, Singer decided to try redesigning the sewing machine, hoping to turn his luck around.

It took him one day to see what was wrong and sketch a rough design. Eleven days later the rebuilt machine existed.

The whole thing sat on a tabletop. He replaced the curved needle with a straight one and hid the needle bar inside an overhanging arm, so it could travel straight up and down. To make the needle rise and fall at an even speed, he reshaped the winding wheel into a heart. Near the needle's point he added a new part, the presser foot: while the machine sewed, this small piece of metal pressed down on the cloth to hold it flat, which freed the operator's hands.

On every measure, the machine beat every sewing machine before it.

On simple seams, Singer's machine sewed 900 stitches a minute without stopping. Howe's managed 250 at best, broke thread often, and forced the user to stop every 18 minutes to adjust the cloth. Doing the same work by hand, a skilled seamstress of the day could manage about 40 stitches a minute.

In 1959, Andrew B. Jack of MIT set out 10 basic mechanical features that any practical sewing machine must have. Measured against that list, Singer's machine, built more than a hundred years earlier, was the only one of its time to bring all 10 together. Two of them — the presser foot and the ability to sew along a curve — were his own.

In 1851, Singer, the machinist Phelps and the investor Zieber founded I.M. Singer & Company, and the patent came through.

A problem that had baffled inventors for more than half a century was solved that quickly — so smoothly it seems hard to believe. But look back over Singer's life and nothing about it is hard to explain.

Everything Singer knew about building machines he learned by doing. He never went to a proper school; not long after his parents divorced he ran away from home at 12 and went into the machine trade early.

At the time the machine trade was riding as high as the computer industry would later, and countless young men were captivated by it.

For Singer, though, machinery was only a way to eat. What he really wanted was the stage. At 19 he joined a band of traveling players, took lead roles in Shakespeare, and toured from town to town. Only when he married for the first time and had a family to feed did he set the dream of stardom aside, for the time being.

Four months after he went back to machine work he could stand on his own, winning contracts to build machinery for factories. In 1839, working on a canal-digging project, he invented a drilling tool later called a forerunner of the drill press, and patented it.

He thought little of it, sold the patent quickly for $2,000, put together his own theater company, and picked up the acting dream again.

Had the company not gone bankrupt five years later through bad management, he might never have returned to machines.

Perhaps it was reaching 40, but this time Singer showed a little more "reason." He did not rush to sell the patent, and he saw the potential of the home market.

The United States then had no standardized clothing production and no assembly lines. The ready-made market was tiny, and shops carried few garments that were well made or comfortable. For reasons of both money and quality, most American families sewed their own clothes or had a tailor make them.

Compared with the garment factories, households plainly wanted far more sewing machines. The trouble was that more than half a century of failed development had left many people with no faith in the thing.

How to convince people that the Singer machine was better, and get them to pay for it, became the problem Singer threw himself at.

His theatrical talent finally found a "practical" use. He took his Singer machine on the road with a troupe, working the fairs and the circuses and belting out The Song of the Shirt. This tireless, slightly odd way of selling was still rare in an America only entering the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.

He also paid a handsome salary to a small, good-looking seamstress and sat her in the window of his Broadway store, quietly sewing clothes on a Singer. The tactic was strikingly modern and it worked: it drew bigger crowds than the wildly popular Barnum's American Museum down the street.

"Even the slightest woman can work a Singer sewing machine," Singer would shout, pushing into the crowd of onlookers over and over. Set against the seamstress's easy, practiced hands, the line cleared away a good deal of prejudice against the machine.

The run of good fortune was soon cut short by Elias Howe Jr.

In the name of defending his patent, Howe took a number of sewing machine makers to court, Singer among them. Howe's machine had plenty of faults, but two of its key designs, both certified by the U.S. Patent Office — the needle with its eye at the point, and the lockstitch — were used in every sewing machine that came after.

The young Singer company had no money for a senior lawyer. Ambrose Jordan, the well-known New York attorney who had helped Singer obtain his sewing machine patent, thought Singer coarse and wanted nothing more to do with his cases, so he handed the matter to his son-in-law, Edward S. Clark.

Clark was the same age as Singer. Born rich, well educated from childhood, he was shrewd and cool-headed. Like his father-in-law, he did not much like this loud, headlong inventor. But he believed in Singer's gift for invention and in the sewing machine market, and he generously agreed to fight the case for nothing — on the condition that a third of the company be put in his name and that he control its finances.

The partnership began on unequal terms, and it went on to pay both men far more than either expected.

In 1854 the court ruled for Howe. Singer and the other makers refused to accept the verdict and filed a still larger wave of suits, each on the strength of the patents it held.

Congress had passed the first U.S. patent act as far back as 1790, and in 1850 it voted to enlarge the Patent Office to hold as many as 17,000 models of inventions. But as of 1854 there were still no clear rules on damages for infringement.

Facing a tangle of suits and countersuits that no one could unpick, the lawyer Orlando B. Potter proposed something new — what would later be called the patent pool. The inventions held by each patent holder were gathered together and licensed as a single bundle. Each member paid the sewing machine alliance $15 for every machine it sold, but shared nothing else: members set their own prices and competed freely.

For Singer the long litigation cost nothing. A Singer machine listed at $125 cost $23 to make, which left ample room for profit. More important, Clark's arrival quickly opened the American home market to Singer and pushed the company into markets abroad.

What came next may sound familiar. Plenty of industries and companies today still use the same measures Clark took to drive sales.

To open the home market fully, Clark picked a set of sales agents and set up distribution offices across the country. These offices did more than sell machines; they carried an important service role.

Every sales point had at least a manager, a mechanic, a demonstrator and a salesperson. Following Singer's example, the demonstrator — a young seamstress — sat in the store sewing quietly, and also taught, showing buyers how to work the machine.

Machines were delivered to the buyer's home and assembled free by the staff. If anything went wrong in use, the customer could come back to the sales office at any time for servicing and repair.

Clark also advertised that a sewing machine would not only free up more spare time but supplement the household income — about $1,000 over a year.

Both promises appealed strongly to housewives and tailors alike. As women grew more conscious of their own interests, housewives wanted more than housework, and winning more "spare time" mattered to them a great deal. For tailors, machine production no longer stood opposed to handwork: much as a laptop is to today's office worker, the sewing machine became an indispensable piece of their "office equipment."

Meanwhile the company set up its own Research & Design Department. By now Singer was more like Clark's deputy, pouring his energy into developing and making the product.

In 1856 he cut the machine's weight further and squeezed production costs, bringing the price down from $125 to $50. In 1857 he was granted 12 sewing machine patents. Two years later, the "hands-free" treadle machine went on sale. Annual sales of Singer machines reached 10,953 units, more than 100 times the 1853 figure.

That jump in sales also owed something to the installment plan Clark introduced. In 1856 Clark reworked the short-term financing McCormick had used to get farmers to buy his reapers, turning it into a long-term installment purchase. The total paid came out a little higher than paying in full, but a customer could take the machine home after a down payment of $3 to $5 and then clear the balance and the interest month by month.

Besides making a sewing machine easier to buy, the arrangement made customers feel the trust Singer was extending to them. No other maker would take that risk, and Singer's name grew further because of it.

Singer's grip on quality, together with Clark's shrewd selling, broke open the competitive order of the sewing machine market after the American Civil War began in 1861. Before the war, the American maker Wheeler & Wilson was Singer's chief rival and outsold it by more than 10,000 machines in 1860. By 1870, after the war, Singer's sales hit 127,833 units, more than 40,000 ahead of Wheeler & Wilson.

The overseas market Singer began building in 1855 matured as well. Between 1860 and 1900, Singer's foreign sales totaled $90 million; as the examples at the top of this article show, people all over the world used the machine for anything that needed sewing. That golden run lasted until roughly the middle of the 20th century.

The Second World War then reshuffled the sewing machine industry again.

Singer went into decline. The huge network it had laid across the world's home sewing machine market turned into a handicap. The long war destroyed its factories and machines in country after country and scattered its workers. A system built over nearly 100 years fell apart in an instant.

Housewives who had been loyal to Singer were losing interest in sewing itself. They were after independence and rights, and personal lives beyond the family. Even those who stayed at home rarely cared about making clothes any more, now that standardized production and assembly lines had matured.

While Singer was still nursing the wounds of the war, competitors in Japan and Europe rose fast. Their cheaper machines, better suited to large-scale industrial production, soon eclipsed Singer's momentum... By 2004 Singer no longer existed as an independent company, having been bought by the American machine maker SVP Worldwide.

Singer saw none of this. The second half of his life showed him only the company's growth and success. For all his extravagance, when he died in 1875 he left an estate worth, in today's money, $150 million.

Unlike most inventors, Singer had no interest in changing the world. He once said so plainly: "I don't care a damn for the invention. The dimes are what I'm after." That is not even the most startling part. He had at least 18 children by six women, and married only two of them.

Clark loathed and looked down on him, and still needed his genius for invention. And the partnership the two held together out of mutual interest set no small number of precedents for how later industries — home appliances, cars and others — and the companies in them would build and sell.

The high-quality goods that corporate research and design departments turn out today, the well-worked installment plans, the after-sales service networks: all of them have a distant connection to Singer's breakthroughs on the sewing machine.

For modern society, Singer's contribution goes far beyond the sewing machine he redesigned.

Cover image from jakszyc