Elias Howe: The Lockstitch Sewing Machine and His Patent War With Singer

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Elias Howe Jr. was born in Massachusetts and apprenticed in the textile mills of Lowell in the mid-1830s until the Panic of 1837 closed them. In Cambridge he went to work for Ari Davis, a maker of chronometers and scientific instruments, and there he set out to build a sewing machine. Earlier inventors had failed by copying the motion of hand sewing. Howe combined an automatic feed, a shuttle running beneath the cloth and a needle with its eye at the point, which pushed a loop of thread through the fabric for the shuttle's second thread to pass through, forming a lockstitch. He received his U.S. patent in the fall of 1846, but American investors and tailors, wary of cost and lost jobs, would not back him.

His brother Amasa sold one machine in London to William Thomas, a maker of corsets, umbrellas and valises, and Howe moved his family to England, where disputes with Thomas ruined him. His wife Elizabeth returned home ill, and Howe followed after selling prototypes for steerage fare; she died soon after. He found Isaac Singer, Walter Hunt and others selling machines built on his design, and after five years of litigation in the early 1850s the courts ruled for him, bringing royalties that made him a multimillionaire. In the Civil War he equipped a Connecticut volunteer regiment, enlisted as a private and served as regimental postmaster despite gout. He won a gold medal at the Paris exhibition and the Legion of Honor, and died in the fall of 1867 at 48.

• A family story says he found the needle design in a dream of guards whose spears had holes near the tip.
• Singer added usability changes such as a foot treadle but kept Howe's core mechanism.
• In the early 1850s Howe patented an automatic continuous clothing closure that resembles the zipper.
• He walked the army camps leaning on a shillelagh because of his gout.
• The Beatles dedicated their 1960s film Help to him.