came the first widely
advertised consumer appliance, pioneered installment buying and patent
pooling, and revolutionized the ready-made clothing industry. It also
weathered the protests of those who feared the new machine was a threat
to their livelihood.

The practical sewing machine is not the result of one man's genius, but
rather the culmination of a century of thought, work, trials, failures,
and partial successes of a long list of inventors. History is too quick
to credit one or two men for an important invention and to forget the
work that preceded and prodded each man to contribute his share. It is
no discredit to Howe to state that he _did not invent the sewing
machine_. Howe's work with the sewing machine was important, and he did
patent certain improvements, but his work was one step along the way. It
is for the reader to decide whether it was the turning point.

Since the sewing machine has been considered by some as one of the most
important inventions of 19th-century America, of equal importance to
this story of the invention is the history of the sewing machine's
development into a practical, popular commodity. Since many new
companies blossomed overnight to manufacture this very salable item, a
catalog list of more than one hundred and fifty of these 19th-century
companies is included in this study. Still, the list is probably
incomplete. Many of the companies remained in business a very short time
or kept their activities a secret to avoid payment of royalties to
patent holders. Evidence of these companies is difficult to find. It is
hoped that additional information will come to light as a result of
this initial attempt to list and date known companies. The dating of
individual machines based on their serial numbers is also a difficult
task. Individual company records of this type have not survived;
however, using the commercial machines in the patent collection, for
which we know one limiting date--the date the machine was deposited at
the patent office--and using the records that have survived, an
estimated date based on the serial number can be established for many of
the better known machines.

_Acknowledgments_

I am greatly indebted to the late Dr. Frederick Lewton, whose
interest in the history of the sewing machine initiated the
collecting of information about it for the Smithsonian
Institution's Division of Textiles archives and whose out-of-print
booklet "