nd abandoned his invention,
just as success was in sight. But Howe knew nothing of any of these
inventors. There is no evidence that he had ever seen the work of
another.

The idea obsessed him to such an extent that he could do no other work,
and yet he must live. By this time he was married and had children, and
his wages were only nine dollars a week. Just then an old schoolmate,
George Fisher, agreed to support his family and furnish him with five
hundred dollars for materials and tools. The attic in Fisher's house in
Cambridge was Howe's workroom. His first efforts were failures, but all
at once the idea of the lock-stitch came to him. Previously all machines
(except Hunt's, which was unknown, not having even been patented) had
used the chainstitch, wasteful of thread and easily unraveled. The two
threads of the lockstitch cross in the materials joined together, and
the lines of stitches show the same on both sides. In short, the
chainstitch is a crochet or knitting stitch, while the lockstitch is a
weaving stitch. Howe had been working at night and was on his way home,
gloomy and despondent, when this idea dawned on his mind, probably
rising out of his experience in the cotton mill. The shuttle would be
driven back and forth as in a loom, as he had seen it thousands of
times, and passed through a loop of thread which the curved needle would
throw out on the other side of the cloth; and the cloth would be
fastened to the machine vertically by pins. A curved arm would ply the
needle with the motion of a pick-axe. A handle attached to the fly-wheel
would furnish the power.

On that design Howe made a machine which, crude as it was, sewed more
rapidly than five of the swiftest needle workers. But apparently to no
purpose. His machine was too expensive, it could sew only a straight
seam, and it might easily get out of order. The needle workers were
opposed, as they have generally been, to any sort of laborsaving
machinery, and there was no manufacturer willing to buy even one machine
at the price Howe asked, three hundred dollars.

Howe's second model was an improvement on the first. It was more compact
and it ran more smoothly. He had no money even to pay the fees necessary
to get it patented. Again Fisher came to the rescue and took Howe and
his machine to Washington, paying all the expenses, and the patent was
issued in September, 1846. But, as the machine still failed to find
buyers, Fisher gave up hope. He had