. His improvements in the Blodgett and Lerow
machine included a table to hold the cloth horizontally rather than
vertically (this had been used by Bachelder and Wilson also), a yielding
vertical presser foot to hold the cloth down as the needle was drawn up,
and a vertically reciprocating straight needle driven by a rotary,
overhanging shaft.

The story of the invention and first trial of the machine was told by
Singer in the course of a patent suit sometime later:

I explained to them how the work was to be fed over the table and
under the presser-foot, by a wheel, having short pins on its
periphery, projecting through a slot in the table, so that the work
would be automatically caught, fed and freed from the pins, in
place of attaching and detaching the work to and from the baster
plate by hand, as was necessary in the Blodgett machine.

Phelps and Zieber were satisfied that it would work. I had no
money. Zieber offered forty dollars to build a model machine.
Phelps offered his best endeavors to carry out my plan and make the
model in his shop; if successful we were to share equally. I worked
at it day and night, sleeping but three or four hours a day out of
the twenty-four, and eating generally but once a day, as I knew I
must make it for the forty dollars or not get it at all.

The machine was completed in eleven days. About nine o'clock in the
evening we got the parts together and tried it; it did not sew; the
workmen exhausted with almost unremitting work, pronounced it a
failure and left me one by one.

Zieber held the lamp, and I continued to try the machine, but
anxiety and incessant work had made me nervous and I could not get
tight stitches. Sick at heart, about midnight, we started for our
hotel. On the way we sat down on a pile of boards, and Zieber
mentioned that the loose loops of thread were on the upper side of
the cloth. It flashed upon me that we had forgot to adjust the
tension on the needle thread. We went back, adjusted the tension,
tried the machine, sewed five stitches perfectly and the thread
snapped, but that was enough. At three o'clock the next day the
machine was finished. I took it to New York and employed Mr.
Charles M. Keller to patent it. It was used as a model in the
application for the patent.[53]

The first machine was completed about t