he had obtained new financial help, improved
his machine to produce 200 stitches a minute, and organized the first
French sewing-machine company.[20] The Revolution of 1848, however,
brought this enterprise to an early end. Before new support could be
found other inventors had appeared with better machines, and
Thimonnier's was passed by. In addition to the two French patents
Thimonnier also received a British patent with his associate Jean Marie
Magnin in 1848 and one in the United States in 1850. He achieved no
financial gain from either of these and died a poor man.

While Thimonnier was developing his chainstitch machine in France,
Walter Hunt,[21] perhaps best described as a Yankee mechanical genius,
was working on a different kind of sewing machine in the United States.
Sometime between 1832 and 1834 he produced at his shop in New York a
machine that made a lockstitch.[22] This stitch was the direct result of
the mechanical method devised to produce the stitching and represented
the first occasion an inventor had not attempted to reproduce a hand
stitch. The lockstitch required two threads, one passing through a loop
in the other and both interlocking in the heart of the seam. At the time
Hunt did not consider the sewing machine any more promising than several
other inventions that he had in mind, and, after demonstrating that the
machine would sew, he sold his interest in it for a small sum and did
not bother to patent it.

A description--one of few ever published--and sketch of a rebuilt Hunt
machine (fig. 9) appeared in an article in the _Sewing Machine News_ in
1881.[23] The important element in the Hunt invention was an eye-pointed
needle working in combination with a shuttle carrying a second thread.
Future inventors were thus no longer hampered by the erroneous idea that
the sewing machine must imitate the human hands and fingers. Though
Hunt's machine stitched short, straight seams with speed and accuracy,
it could not sew curved or angular work. Its stitching was not
continuous, but had to be reset at the end of a short run. The validity
of Hunt's claim as the inventor of the lockstitch and the prescribed
method of making it was argued many times, especially during the Elias
Howe patent suits of the 1850s. The decision against Hunt was not a
question of invention,[24] but one of right to ownership or control.
Hunt did little to promote his sewing machine and sold it together with
the right to patent to G