The moment the sewing machine stopped being one inventor's workshop curiosity and became a patented, defensible machine. Elias Howe's 1846 United States patent for a lockstitch machine, using a needle with the eye at its point and a shuttle beneath the cloth, anchored a decade of litigation known as the Sewing Machine War, settled in 1856 when Howe, Isaac Singer and their rivals pooled their patents rather than keep suing one another. Howe was not the first to build a working sewing machine, only the first to hold a patent nobody could out-litigate, which is its own kind of turning point.
Facts
Milestone Year WhenSeptember 10, 1846: Elias Howe was awarded United States Patent 4,750 for a lock-stitch sewing machine. 1 LocationUnited States Patent Office 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Held Differently
Barthelemy Thimonnier, Figures Why this is disputed. Thimonnier patented and factory-built a working sewing machine in France in 1830, sixteen years before Howe's US patent; whose claim to invention weighs more depends on whether a patent, a working factory, or an undisputed US market outcome is the test. See the recorded open question.
Associated With
Developed By
Sources
1. Elias Howe (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_HoweQuote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe
on September 10, 1846, he was awarded the first United States patent (U.S. patent 4750)
Barthelemy Thimonnier (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barthelemy_ThimonnierQuote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barthelemy_Thimonnier
The patent for his machine was issued to them on 17 July 1830
Open Questions (1 open question)
Who really invented the sewing machine?
At least three inventors have a real claim, by different tests. Thomas Saint patented a design in England in 1790, but it was never built and stayed unknown until 1874. Barthelemy Thimonnier patented a working machine in France in 1830 and ran a small factory of them until rioting tailors, fearing unemployment, destroyed it in 1831. Elias Howe patented a lockstitch machine in the United States in 1846, sixteen years after Thimonnier, but his patent was the one that survived litigation and anchored the industry America and much of the world adopted. Whether invention means the first patent, the first working machine, or the first patent that mattered commercially is a genuine, unsettled question, not a gap in the record.
What would resolve this A single, agreed test for what invention means here: patent priority, working-machine priority, or commercial consequence. Historians of technology have not converged on one, and probably will not, since the three tests answer different questions.
History of technologyElias Howe (Wikipedia)
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