Isaac Singer: Runaway Actor, 26 Children and the $5-Down Sewing Machine

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Isaac Merritt Singer was born in upstate New York in 1811 to a German immigrant father, was effectively abandoned by his mother, and ran away at 12 to join a traveling theater troupe called the Rochester Players. Acting remained his passion. He sold an 1839 patent for a rock drilling machine for $2,000, then spent the money touring for five years with his own Merritt Players under the stage name Isaac Merritt. After a boiler explosion destroyed his wood carving machine prototype in 1849, he ended up in Orson C. Phelps's Boston shop, where he redesigned the faulty sewing machines being repaired there with a straight vertical needle, a straight back-and-forth shuttle, a presser foot and a continuous feed, patented in August 1851.

Elias Howe sued, the manufacturers sued each other, and in 1856 lawyer Orlando B. Potter brokered the Sewing Machine Combination, the first patent pool in United States history. Partner Edward Cabot Clark created the installment plan: $5 down and $3 a month, backed by repossession agents. Singer's private life was chaos. He fathered 26 children with five women, ran a secret second family under the name Matthews, was arrested for bigamy after beating his partner of 25 years, Mary Ann Sponsler, and fled to London in 1862. He ended up in Devon with Isabella Eugenie Boyer in the 110-room Oldway Mansion and died in 1875.

• Earlier sewing machines used curved needles and circular shuttles that twisted and snapped the thread every few minutes.
• Interchangeable parts helped cut the machine's price from over $100 to about $10.
• The Clydebank factory in Scotland had a 200-foot tower with the largest four-sided clock in the world at the time.
• Clark forced a restructuring in 1863 to distance the company from Singer, who kept a 40 percent stake.
• From an estate of roughly $13 million, Singer left $500 to his son William, who had testified for his mother in her divorce.