Elias Howe had dreams of a career in the textile industry and became an apprentice in a textile factory in 1835. However, his ambitions did not pan out quite as he had hoped. Just two years into his apprenticeship, the financial panic of 1837 bankrupted his factory, and he was forced to move to Cambridge Massachusetts, where he worked in a carding factory before finding an apprenticeship with a master engineer who specialised in the construction and repair of scientific instruments.
The combination of working in precision engineering and a background in cloth production seems to have inspired Howe’s great idea. He would invent a machine for sewing. There was a problem with this, of course. The sewing machine had already been invented – lots of times. The first patented machine appeared in London in 1790, bizarrely 35 years after another patent for the first needle for a sewing machine.
There were problems with these other machines, too. There is not much...