Elias Howe

NAME Elias Howe Jr. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR American inventor and pioneer of the sewing machine. He is best known for inventing the first practical lockstitch sewing machine, which utilized a needle with the eye at the point and a reciprocating shuttle. His invention revolutionized the garment industry, moving clothing production from slow hand-stitching to rapid mass production.

BIRTH Born July 9, 1819, in Spencer, Massachusetts, USA. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Howe was one of eight children born to Elias Howe Sr. (1792–1867), a farmer who also ran a gristmill and cut lumber to support his large family, and Polly (Bemis) Howe (1791–1871). The family was poor. (1)

Two of Howe's father's brothers were also inventors, suggesting that a talent for mechanical invention ran in the family. (2) 

Howe was a descendant of John Howe (1602–1680), who arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 from Brinklow, Warwickshire, England, and settled in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He was also a descendant of Edmund Rice, another early immigrant to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

CHILDHOOD As early as age six, Howe was put to work alongside his brothers and sisters sewing wires onto cards by hand at home — piecework for a local cotton mill that brought in a little extra money for the family.  He also helped repair the family farmhouse and showed great patience and determination in painstaking tasks, often repairing farm machinery — work he genuinely enjoyed. 

He attended school during the winter months but spent the other seasons working on the farm. By the time he was twelve, his father could no longer afford to feed and clothe him, so he was hired out to work on a neighbor's farm. 

Howe had been born small and frail, however, and his physical limitations meant he never had the strength or stamina needed for hard labor — a challenge he would contend with for the rest of his life. He was also congenitally lame. (2)

EDUCATION Howe received only a basic schooling, attending school in the winter months while working on the farm the rest of the year.  His real education was practical and mechanical: in 1835 he moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, where he apprenticed in a textile factory, acquiring skills that shaped the rest of his career. 

After the mills closed during the economic Panic of 1837, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked in a hemp-carding company before securing a position in the shop of Ari Davis, a master mechanic who built and repaired chronometers and precision instruments for seamen and for scientists at Harvard University. 

It was in Davis's workshop — a gathering place for inventors — that Howe first conceived the idea of the sewing machine after overhearing Davis declare that whoever invented a practical sewing machine would be a rich man. (2)

CAREER RECORD 1835: Howe moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, to work as an apprentice in a cotton machinery factory.

1837: After the Panic of 1837 closed the Lowell mills, Howe moved to Cambridge to work as a mechanic. He eventually found employment in the shop of Ari Davis, a master mechanic in Boston who specialized in repairing precision instruments.

1839–1844: While working for Davis, Howe overheard a conversation about the need for a sewing machine. He spent five years of spare time developing a prototype, eventually leaving his job to focus on the invention full-time while being supported by his friend George Fisher.

1845: He completed his first successful sewing machine, which outperformed five fast seamstresses in a demonstration.

1846: On September 10, 1846, Howe was granted U.S. Patent #4,750 for his sewing machine.

1847–1849: Howe traveled to London to work with William Thomas, a corset manufacturer, to adapt his machine for industrial use. The venture was unsuccessful, and Howe returned to the U.S. in poverty.

1850–1854: Upon his return, he discovered that several manufacturers—most notably Isaac Singer—were selling machines that infringed on his patent. He engaged in a grueling five-year legal battle.

1854: The courts ruled in Howe's favor, restoring his patent rights and forcing competitors to pay him royalties on every machine sold.

1865: He established the Howe Machine Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

APPEARANCE Howe was born small and frail, and remained slight and physically fragile throughout his life; he was also congenitally lame. 

A statue of Howe erected in Seaside Park, Bridgeport, Connecticut, after his death depicts a man with a large, solid face, a prominent nose, soft eyes, and firmly set lips — described by biographer Patricia E. Sweeney as "the face of a determined Yankee inventor."  He is shown holding a hat in one hand and a cane in the other, which reflects his lifelong physical infirmity. (2) 

Elias Howe, circa 1850

FASHION During his years of struggle, he was often seen in worn, threadbare clothes. When he returned from England nearly destitute in 1849 to attend his dying wife's bedside, his brother-in-law had to lend him a suit to wear to her funeral — a detail that vividly captures the depths of poverty to which he had sunk before his patent victory restored his fortune. (2)

CHARACTER Those who knew Howe described him as easygoing, companionable, and fun-loving in his youth, with a humorous side to his personality.  He was also possessed of remarkable patience, determination, and perseverance — qualities evident in the years he spent doggedly developing his sewing machine with little money and no certainty of success. 

His one profound regret was that his first wife, Elizabeth, had died before he achieved the wealth and recognition he had worked so hard for; her death, according to biographer Sweeney, robbed him of much of his characteristic humour and lightness. 

He was generous with his money once he acquired it, sharing his wealth with the friends and relatives who had supported him in his years of struggle. (2)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Howe was described as humorous and fun-loving — a quality that marked him as a youth and in his early adult life, though contemporaries noted that it largely deserted him after the death of his beloved first wife in 1849. (2)

RELATIONSHIPS On March 3, 1841, Howe married Elizabeth Jennings Ames, daughter of Simon Ames and Jane B. Ames, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

They had three children: Jane Robinson Howe (1842–1912), Simon Ames Howe (1844–1883), and Julia Maria Howe (1846–1869). 

Elizabeth battled tuberculosis (consumption) for two years and died shortly after Howe's return from England in 1849. Her death was a blow from which he never fully recovered emotionally, though he channelled his grief into renewed dedication to his work. (

He later married Rose Halladay, who survived him and died on October 10, 1890; she is buried with him at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. 

A close friendship with George Fisher, who provided Howe with $500 and a home for his family during the crucial years of invention, was another significant relationship; Howe later shared his patent winnings generously with Fisher. (2)

MONEY AND FAME Howe spent much of his early adult life in severe poverty, at times unable to clothe or feed his family, reliant on a friend's charity for board and equipment. His fortunes were transformed after winning his patent lawsuit in 1854, after which he earned royalties from every sewing machine manufacturer in America. His income could reach as much as $4,000 a week — an enormous sum in the 1850s. (3) 

Howe died in 1867 a multi-millionaire. 

He became a respected public figure in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a statue was erected in his honour in Seaside Park. 

In 1940, the United States government commemorated him with a 5-cent stamp in the Famous American Inventors series. 

Howe commemorative, 1940 issue

FOOD AND DRINK No specific information about Howe's eating or drinking habits appears to have been recorded.

MUSIC AND ARTS While not a noted patron of the fine arts, he viewed the mechanical design of his machines with an aesthetic eye, ensuring they were as elegant as they were functional

The 1965 Beatles film Help! is dedicated to his memory — a whimsical tribute by one of the most famous bands in history to the inventor of the sewing machine. 

LITERATURE Howe's working methods, however, suggest a man who relied more on mental ingenuity than on written plans — he built his sewing machine from a mental design without blueprints or sketches. (2)

NATURE Having grown up on a farm, he had a foundational respect for nature, though his life's work was dedicated to the industrial and mechanical world that sought to tame

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Howe's consuming passion from at least his mid-twenties was mechanical invention. He would spend his evenings watching his wife sew, mentally working through the problems of the sewing machine, and gave up paid employment entirely for extended periods in order to pursue his project. (2) 

INVENTION OF THE SEWING MACHINE It is one of history’s more cheering notions that a world-changing invention began, as many do, with a slightly offhand remark in a workshop and a man who decided to take it far more seriously than intended. In the early 1840s, a young mechanic named Elias Howe was working in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under a master machinist called Ari Davis, who one day observed—perhaps with the breezy confidence of someone not intending to do it himself—that whoever invented a practical sewing machine would make a fortune. Howe, who clearly had a taste for both practicality and fortune, took this as less of a musing and more of a personal challenge.

By October 1844, according to Howe’s biographer James Parton, he experienced what inventors like to describe as a “flash of insight,” which in practice usually means a long period of thinking followed by a moment when everything finally lines up. Howe’s revelation was deceptively simple: perhaps a machine need not imitate the human hand at all. This was rather like realising that birds fly perfectly well without flapping their arms. From this came the idea of a two-thread system using a shuttle and a needle with its eye at the point—a detail so small you could miss it, and yet so important that the entire enterprise depended upon it.

From this modest epiphany emerged three innovations that would quietly underpin the entire future of sewing machinery. First, the eye-pointed needle—placing the hole at the tip rather than the blunt end, which sounds obvious now but had previously eluded everyone. Second, the shuttle, which passed a second thread beneath the cloth to create a sturdy lockstitch instead of the rather unreliable chain stitch. And third, the automatic feed, which relieved the operator of the tedious business of pushing the fabric along by hand, thereby allowing the machine to get on with it at a pace no human could sensibly match.

There is also, as with many Victorian inventors, a dream. In Howe’s case it involved cannibals brandishing spears with holes near the tips, which obligingly demonstrated where the eye of the needle ought to go. This story appears in family lore and has been treated by historians with the polite scepticism usually reserved for tales involving prophetic vegetables or unusually helpful livestock.

Practical matters, however, proceeded without the assistance of dream-spears. With $500 from a friend named George Fisher—a sum that would today buy you either a small machine or a large disappointment—Howe retreated to his father’s attic and got to work. By May 1845, he had a functioning device. When demonstrated, it stitched at a brisk 250 stitches per minute, compared with the roughly 50 a human could manage, which must have been rather like watching a tortoise race a locomotive.

Elias Howe Sewing Machine September 10, 1846

One might imagine that such a triumph would be greeted with enthusiasm. Instead, it was met with a distinct lack of customers. Tailors and seamstresses, understandably, viewed the machine as a contraption designed to render them obsolete, which is rarely a persuasive selling point. Howe secured a patent in 1846, but found America curiously uninterested. His brother Amasa Howe took the machine to England, where it was sold to a London corset-maker named William Thomas for £250—proof that even transformative technologies sometimes begin life as export items.

It should be noted that Howe was not the first to attempt a sewing machine. Thomas Saint had built one as early as 1790, and Walter Hunt produced a working model in the 1830s, but declined to patent it for fear it would put seamstresses out of work—a touching concern that, in the long view, proved about as effective as declining to invent the rain. What distinguished Howe was not originality in isolation, but the happy combination of several clever ideas into a machine that actually worked, and worked well.

When Howe returned to America in 1849, he discovered that others had been less hesitant about the commercial possibilities. Chief among them was Isaac Singer, who, after examining Howe’s design, spent eleven industrious days producing an improved version with various practical refinements and began selling it with admirable enthusiasm—and without paying Howe anything at all. This led to a legal battle of five years, at the end of which Howe prevailed, securing royalties from manufacturers and inadvertently helping to create one of America’s first patent-sharing arrangements, the Sewing Machine Combination.

In the end, Howe’s machine did what all truly significant inventions do: it quietly changed everything. It helped make clothing cheaper and more widely available, and established the lockstitch as the foundation of modern sewing. Nearly two centuries on, every sewing machine still carries, somewhere within its agreeable clatter, a small but essential echo of that moment in a Cambridge attic when one man decided that the hand was not the only way to sew.

SCIENCE AND MATHS Howe was a self-taught mechanical genius who, working without formal scientific training or engineering qualifications, devised three innovations — the eye-pointed needle, the lockstitch shuttle, and the automatic feed — that became the fundamental principles of virtually all subsequent sewing machines. (4) 

Howe also patented an early form of the zipper in 1851. 

Howe helped to create the first industrial patent pool in American history in 1856, a business model with lasting implications for how competing companies manage intellectual property. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Howe was raised in a traditional New England Protestant environment. His work ethic reflected the "Protestant work ethic" of the time—viewing diligent labor and the improvement of society through industry as a moral calling

POLITICS Howe's political activity was largely expressed through his Civil War service. He enlisted as a private in the Union Army in August 1862, despite his age and chronic infirmities, personally financing the equipment of the entire 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry and paying the men out of his own pocket when their army wages were delayed. (2)

His 1863 remark that over a million Union soldiers were clothed by machines based on his inventions reflects pride in his contribution to the Northern cause. (3)

SCANDAL William Thomas of London, to whom Howe's brother Amasa sold the rights to the sewing machine in 1846, obtained a British patent for the machine in his own name rather than Howe's as promised, and also reneged on a verbal agreement to pay Elias a royalty on each machine sold in Britain. Howe and his family moved to London on the basis of Thomas's assurances, and Thomas subsequently treated Howe with contempt, ordering him to work as a factory repairman after he had completed the agreed commission. (2) 

The dispute with Isaac Singer was the most significant controversy of Howe's career: Singer had perfected a copy of Howe's lockstitch machine and was selling it without acknowledging Howe's patent. Singer's lawyers attempted to undermine Howe's claim to priority by producing a rival inventor, Walter Hunt, who had made a sewing machine model earlier than Howe. The court rejected this challenge when it emerged that Hunt's machine did not work and had never been patented. (2)

MILITARY RECORD Howe enlisted in the Union Army on August 14, 1862, as a private in Company D of the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry. Despite his age (43) and lifelong physical frailty, he served in a Union Army camp near Baltimore, Maryland, where he took on the role of Regimental Postmaster, regularly riding to and from Baltimore with war news. He was often seen walking with the aid of a shillelagh. 

He helped to organise the regiment, outfitted it entirely at his own expense, provided horses for the officers, and paid the men from his own funds when army wages were delayed. He mustered out on July 19, 1865. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Howe was born small and frail and was congenitally lame.  His fragile health was a constant limitation: it ended his hired farm work as a boy, made army service difficult in his forties, and was the ultimate reason he had to leave his post as Regimental Postmaster. 

HOMES Howe was born and raised in Spencer, Massachusetts. 

As a young man he lived and worked in Lowell and then Cambridge, Massachusetts. For a period he and his family lived in the attic of his father's house in Cambridge while he worked on his sewing machine invention, and later were boarded in the home of his patron George Fisher. 

In 1847–1848, the Howe family moved to a poor district of London in connection with his business arrangement with William Thomas. 

After returning to America and winning his patent battles, Howe settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he became a prominent and respected citizen and built his Howe Machine Co. factory. (2) 

TRAVEL Howe's travels were largely driven by commercial necessity rather than pleasure. He sent his brother Amasa to England in 1846 to seek a buyer for his sewing machine patent, and in 1847–1848 moved his entire family to London to work for William Thomas.  Following disputes with Thomas and the death of his wife, he returned nearly destitute to New York. (2) 

During his Civil War service he traveled regularly between his army camp near Baltimore and Washington. 

DEATH Howe died on October 3, 1867, aged 48, of gout and a massive blood clot, while visiting his daughter's home in Brooklyn, New York. 

He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. His second wife, Rose Halladay, who died on October 10, 1890, is buried with him. 

His father died just two months later, on December 28, 1867, one day after his 75th birthday. 

The large factory Howe had established in Bridgeport, Connecticut, passed to his son, who managed it until a fire destroyed it on July 26, 1883. (2) 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA His story has been covered in numerous reference works and encyclopaedias, and he has appeared in documentary programmes about the history of American invention.

ACHIEVEMENTS Received U.S. Patent for the lockstitch sewing machine (1846).

Won the legal battle that established the "Sewing Machine Combination," the first patent pool in American history.

Awarded a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1867.

Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2004) (5)

In 1863, he prided himself on the fact that over a million Civil War soldiers were "clothed, kitted and covered by fabric sewn on machines using my inventions."

Sources: (1) Wikipedia: Elias Howe (2) EBSCO Research Starters: Elias Howe (3) Encyclopaedia of Trivia: Sewing Machine (4) National Inventors Hall of Fame: Elias Howe (5) Britannica: Elias Howe