BY ANY OTHER NAME

 

I can think of no more misbegotten group of failures, frauds and grief stricken dullards than the people who collectively are responsible for one of the most vital and fundamental inventions of the modern world. But I have to wonder, if we called it something else, would it have become so ubiquitous? A rose may be a rose by any other name but would it inspire poets?  But the subject of this essay...if it had been called anything else it might not have made it down this tortured path to fame and ubiquity. 

It all started with a Parisian tailor named Barthelmy Thimonnier (above), who invented the sewing machine in 1830. I know, you think it was invented by Elias Howe, but that is because Elias Howe was a “patent troll”, an opportunist and a liar.

And it took so long because in January of 1839 a mob of 150 or so French "Luddiet" tailors smashed 80 of Thimonnier’s machines, burned the factory making them down and almost lynched Barthelmy.  On 23 February five of the rioting tailors were sentenced to a month's imprisonment, 69 to eight days, and the 75th defendant was acquitted. 

Not that the trial mattered to Barthelmy. With his investment left smoldering, Thimonnier died flat broke and forgotten in 1857.  But first he had invented the sewing machine. 

The vacuum he left behind was filled by the American Walter Hunt, who was a mechanical genius and a business boob from upstate New York. 

Among other things, Walter invented the safety pin, U.S, patient #6281 (above), and a repeating rifle, and a bicycle and a road sweeper. 

And then, in 1834, he improved on Thimonnier’s sewing machine (above).

What Walter Hunt actually invented was a sewing machine needle (above) with the hole - aka, the eye - at the pointy end. Regular needles, invented almost a million years ago, have the eye at the blunt end. But reversed that.

As the needle pushed through the cloth the eye carried the thread with it. When the needle stopped it formed a loop in the thread behind it, and a second thread (from the bobbin) was pushed through the loop. The needle was then withdrawn, pulling the loop tight or “locking” it, around the bobbin thread. This “Lockstitch” was sheer genius and a brilliant insight.  But Hunt never did anything with it because he didn’t want to be lynched by American tailors and he was safely making plenty of money from his safety pin. And that opened the door for Elias Howe to slink through.

Elias Howe told at least two versions of how he "invented" the sewing machine. 

In the sympathetic version he spent hours watching his poor wife Elizabeth  (since dead, and unavailable to testify) support her family doing piecemeal sewing work . In the Freudian version, Howe dreamed about Indians shooting arrows through a blanket.  In fact, both stories were pure horse manure.

In fact Howe had been a mechanic repairing looms in a textile mill, before he started living off his wife's sewing abilities, and that is where he learned all about shuttles and bobbins, and probably saw a version of Hunts sewing machine needle. Like a loom, Howe’s sewing machine, patient #4750 (above)  granted in 1846, fed the cloth in vertically and the needle and bobbin worked horizontally. Because of this uncomfortable assembly, Howe’s sewing machine only worked sort of, and it was so clumsy that Howe couldn’t find anybody to buy it. He never made a dime selling what he claimed was his actual invention.

Then in 1850 Howe saw a demonstration of a machine which did work, built by a mechanic and an actor and one of the most foul-tempered bigamists in antebellum America, Mr. Isaac Singer (above). 

Singer’s sewing machine put the needle vertical and fed the cloth in horizontally, which made the whole thing functional. But Howe noticed that Singer had 'borrowed' "his" lockstitch, which you may remember Hunt had actually invented but never patented. But Howe did.  Anyway,  Howe immediately demanded $25,000 in “royalties” (i.e. blackmail).  

One of Singer’s long suffering business partners observed that, “Howe is a perfect humbug. He knows quite well he never invented anything of value.” Singer was typically more direct, offering to “kick (Howe) down the steps of the machine shop.” 

But what eventually made Howe (above) a wealthy humbug was his patent for Mr. Hunt's lockstitch. As a magazine at the time noted, Howe had “litigated himself into fortune and fame.” But then this story is not about the sewing machine.

This story is about another patent Elias Howe trolled for, this one granted him in 1851. And just like his sewing machine, Howe’s patent for an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” (above) did not work. And just like his sewing machine, rather than improve it, he just filed it away and waited to see if anybody else ever fixed it. But, since nobody else made his ugly and clumsy device work during his lifetime, Howe had nobody to sue and the device remained an obscure little footnote. And people continued to live with the original “Clothing Closure” device, the button. 

Until civil war veteran, and traveling salesman Whitcomb Judson, desperate to support his wife and three daughters, missed his street car.

See, originally Whitcomb was not interested in replacing the button. This rather odd man liked to eat bananas and mushrooms because he thought the mushrooms gave him psychic powers. Judson’s “mushroom visions” told him was going to get rich designing pneumatic street cars. He was  granted 14 patents for them, 

They were a mode of transport powered by, as described rather unhelpfully in his advertising “…a screw, but without a thread; and this screw though always revolving in one direction, will send the (trolley) cars in either direction, and do this by a pure and simple rolling and not a sliding friction..” 

It sounded mysterious and magical and vastly overly complicated, and was actually used for a few weeks briefly in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1890 before it broke down completely. 

So, in 1893, as a back up invention, he marketed his patent #’s 504038 and 504037 as a “claps lock” for ladies high button shoes, and “…wherever it is desired to detachable-ly connect a pair of adjacent flexible parts.”  Judson was clearly no technical writer.

Mr. Judson explained that “...each link of each chain (4 links per inch) is provided both with a male and a female coupling part…”. But sadly this coupling had a tendency to pop open, leaving the lady in question barefoot on the public way. 

So, in 1896, Judson added “….a cam-action slider…” to his invention, now calling it his “C-curity Fastener”. The company he formed to exploit the C-curity (The Universal Fastener Company) did well, and the fungi lover was making money, but he never got as rich as he had expected. It was a shame the mushrooms never warned Whitcomb Judson about the dangers of eating too many mushrooms because he died of liver failure in 1909.

And that brings us to the dull Mr. Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback (above), a Swiss emigrant to Canada, working as an electrical engineer for the Universal Fastener  Company, and married to the plant manager’s daughter, Elvira.   In 1911 Elvira died, and to distract himself from his grief Gideon started fiddling with Judson's “C-curity Fastener”. 

He added more teeth (the male coupler), ten to an inch, and widened the slider, and then he realized he could do away with the couplers entirely. All he needed was the teeth and the slider. Gideon called his invention the “'Separable Fastener”. It was granted  Patent # 1219881, in 1917. Gideon even designed a machine to mass produce his fastener. But it remained a curious thing, attracting very little attention except on what were once ladies hi-button shoes, which were soon out of fashion And that was the death of the Separable Fastener...  Until!

In 1923, Mr. B.F. Goodrich saw the new fasteners used on a pair of rubber galoshes his company was trying to sell the U.S. Army.   B.F. was delighted, and in demonstrating the new rubber boots he told an employee to “Zip ‘er up.”  And thus was born the onomatopoeia of the new invention, the name that sounds like the sound the Separable Fastener makes when it is used; the zipper. And the world has been a better place ever since.

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