The Sewing Machine Was Patented 180 Years Ago Today — The Machine Didn't Sell. The Patent Did. — Woody Magazine, Sept. 10, 2026

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Sept. 10, 2026 (Thu.)

Company StorySept. 10, 2026

The Sewing Machine Was Patented 180 Years Ago Today — The Machine Didn't Sell. The Patent Did.

In Three Lines

On September 10, 1846, Elias Howe received a patent for a sewing machine. It cost $300 apiece, and nobody bought one.
Howe won his lawsuits. Even after he won, not one company in America could build a complete machine without stepping on someone else's patent.
In 1856, four rivals put their patents in one basket. Machines started selling, and only then did Howe get rich.

A hundred and eighty years ago today, the U.S. Patent Office issued patent No. 4,750 to Elias Howe Jr., a machinist from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His machine used a needle with the eye at the point, and a shuttle underneath the cloth that caught the loop with a second thread. That is the lockstitch, and the household sewing machine still makes it today.

Howe built each machine by hand and priced it at $300. Tailors came to look and went home without buying. They agreed it sewed several times faster than a person. That was the problem. A machine that fast would drive down the price of a suit and, they figured, put their shops out of business. Howe's backer gave up on him.

The headline says the patent sold. Strictly speaking, Howe never sold it. He rented it out, at so many dollars for every machine somebody else built. That rental business turned out to be far bigger than the machine business ever was. This is the story of how.

The story where Singer stole it

Say "sewing machine" and most of us think of Singer. And most of us have heard that Isaac Singer copied Howe's idea and got rich on it. That is a fair thing to believe. A federal court believed it too.

Unable to sell a machine in America, Howe sailed to England not long after the patent came through. He went to work for a London corset maker, fitting the machine to corsets, and then fell out with him. By the end he was so broke that he pawned the machine and the patent papers themselves to pay for a passage home. When he landed in New York in 1849, sewing machines built on his design were in production up and down the industrial North. Two years later Isaac Singer joined them, with a patent of his own and a company built on it.

Howe found a new investor, redeemed his papers, and sued. His first case was not against Singer but against a small firm called Lerow & Blodgett. In July 1852, Judge Sprague in Boston ruled for Howe, and Howe used the ruling to get injunctions against everyone else. In May 1853, Wheeler & Wilson became the first company to take a license. Howe's going rate was $25 for every machine built. Singer held out until 1854, then paid a five-figure settlement and joined the line.

If the story ended there, it would be a satisfying one. The inventor won and the copier paid. But this did not make Howe rich. The $25 only arrived when a machine sold, and the lawsuits were choking the whole industry.

The winner couldn't build one either

The reason is that Howe's patent covered the needle and the stitch, not the sewing machine. A machine anyone would actually use needed more. A needle that went straight up and down and a foot that held the cloth flat: that was Singer's patent. The device that nudged the cloth forward after every stitch belonged to Allen Wilson of Wheeler & Wilson. Grover & Baker held a patent on a different stitch. Whoever built a decent machine infringed somebody. So after Howe won, the four of them kept suing each other anyway. The newspapers called it the Sewing Machine War.

Think of a block slated for redevelopment. You need all four lots to put up the building, and four different people own them. While each owner fences his lot and sues the neighbors, nothing gets built. Howe owned the best lot on the block. On his own, he could build exactly as much as the others: nothing.

Howe owned the best lot on the block. On his own, he could build exactly as much as the others: nothing.

Albany, October 1856

The man who proposed taking the fences down was Orlando B. Potter, president of Grover & Baker. He was a lawyer by training, which meant he knew exactly what the war was costing. In 1856 he went to Howe and the other two companies with a proposal. Stop suing one another. Put the patents in one basket. When another company wants to build sewing machines, rent it the whole basket and split the money.

Howe said no at first. He had the most to lose, which was fair enough. Then he named his price. The basket had to be open to at least 24 licensees, and he had to get a cut of his own on top of an equal share. The other three agreed, and on October 24 they signed in Albany, New York. It was the first patent pool in American industry.

The money worked like this. An outside company paid $15 per machine, once. Five dollars went to Howe. Three went into a fund for chasing infringers. The remaining seven were split four ways. So Howe took $6.75 on every machine, about a quarter of the $25 he had been charging.

$15

What an outside builder paid per machine, to one window. Before, it owed several companies separately, and most of them were in court.

Howe's rate went down, and that is when he got rich. Take the fences down and the building goes up. Singer built 2,564 machines in 1856. By 1860 it was building more than 13,000 a year, five times as many. That same year, Singer's partner Edward Clark began selling machines on installment. People who could never find the price at once could find a few dollars a month, and the machines went into homes. Every one of them paid Howe.

Grace Rogers Cooper, the Smithsonian's historian of the sewing machine, estimated that Howe collected more than $2 million between 1856 and 1867, when his patent expired. He died that same year. A man who had barely sold a machine in his life died a millionaire.

It still works this way

The DVD you watch and the digital broadcast you receive rest on the same basket. In 1997, anyone who wanted to use the MPEG-2 video standard needed patents held by nine different companies. Nobody could build a player alone. So that year, with a sign-off from the U.S. Department of Justice, the patents went into one pool and manufacturers paid one window. The industry calls it the first modern patent pool. The skeleton is the one drawn up in Albany 141 years earlier.

Howe did not get rich by winning. After he won, he still could not build a sewing machine, and neither could anyone else. When the four of them stopped fighting, the machines sold, and when the machines sold, the patent paid. A patent does not become money in a courtroom. It becomes money when somebody else sells something with it.

Sources

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