Techstuff Classic: The Sewing Machine

I think is really really exciting. Now. Throughout the history of tech Stuff, I've had the opportunity to have lots of different interesting guests on the show, including other hosts of How Stuff Work shows, And in this episode, Holly Fry, one of the co hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class, joined the show to talk about an enormous patent war and and not talking about Samsung and Apple,

I'm talking about sewing machines. Yep, the Humble sewing machine was the centerpiece of a patent war that got pretty ugly, and Holly and I talked not just about that, but about the technology and its cultural impact. This episode originally published on October thirteenth, two thousand and fourteen. I hope you enjoy this classic episode of tech Stuff. So before we jump into the sordid history of the sewing machine, I thought I would remind folks what a patent is.

What's all about. So patents are that's a set of exclusive rights granted by government some form of agency that has authority to an inventor or an assignee for the use of an invention. Now, an invention does not have to be a complete thing all by itself. It could be a component of a thing, like if you were

to have a full invention. Let's say it's a washing machine, because we've done a tech Stuff episode about washing machines, and you come up with a way to improve washing machines so that they wash clothes uh more thoroughly or without as much bashing around, so the clothing doesn't take as much of a beating. And you come up with

that that improvement, and then you patent it. You can do that, that's perfectly acceptable, and then any washing machine that would use that particular improvement would have to either have been made by you or have received your permission to use that specific technology. Yes, so patents can be for a full invention with all the different components, or it can be just a tiny little thing that's an improvement.

The point of it is the reason why you would want to patent it is that you get those exclusive rights to use that technology. Now, in return for that, you have to disclose how that technology works. You submit a patent application that has a full description of the mechanism and the purpose of your invention, and that becomes publicly available, and once the patent expires, which they do, anyone can actus that information and make use of it. But during the course of that patent, that the lifespan

of that patent, it's all you, boss. They got to come through you. Yeah, Although that is an interesting one related to what we're talking about today, because there were several instances on the road to the sewing machine actually becoming a fully fledged thing where there were some FIBs told in the patent filings that they could keep their proprietary information to themselves, so when people tried to replicate them,

they did not always work. Right. See, you could if you wanted to, if you invented something, there's nothing nothing that requires you to get a patent, you could keep it secret and say this magical technology is mine and mine alone. But the danger of that, of course, is if someone gets hold of it and figures out how it works, they could then make the same thing with

and you would have no protection. Only could they make the same thing, they could file a patent for it, and then you would no longer be able to use the thing you invented. Yeah, it's all about first rights so as it turns out, And we haven't even gotten into the complication of filing for a patent in one country versus filing for a paton and another. But we we've hemmed in hod long enough about patents. Let's start off.

Tell me what what was sewing before the sewing machine. Well, most people would probably recognize it if they thought about pre sewing machines sewing, they would think of an needle and thread. But even way before that, there were people using bones and sticks to kind of poke holes into fabrics, usually leathers, and then they would pass a lace through.

It was not all one continuous thing where the lace was attached to the the boner stick, and then they added the eye that circle that the whatever you're lacing material passes through. The thing that confounds me whenever I have to threaten. Many people say that I think you either got it or you don't. I don't got it. Um, I hope I keep it forever, because I have a few friends who are saying they're getting to the age

and their eyesight isn't letting them keep it anymore. But yeah, so that eventually that I was added and people were able to do it all in one fell swoop where they poked the whole am, passed the binding material through, and that also developed things like embroidery. But it wasn't

really until the Industrial Revolution that stitching became mechanized. And even pre Industrial Revolution in the mid seventeen hundreds where kind of industry was first starting to get seated, is really where we started having first people on record actually filing things. Right. So you have Charles Wisenthal here who received a patent for a needle for a sewing machine, but it had a distinct disadvantage and that it was

a design for a needle for a machine that didn't exist. Yeah, he just really felt like he had the needle situation worked out and eventually the rest would follow. You've got to really nail the needle, is his approach, which is the needle. How it came to be where it is today really took a lot of iterations. And his needle um had was pointed on both ends, and it had an eye, but the eye was in the middle, which is not If anybody knows a modern sewing machine or

hand sewing needle, the eye is usually not in the middle. Right, So then we moved forward his s We have Thomas sat who I love the title of his patent. We talked about this in the History podcast. It's a succinct. It's so delightful and just completely rebos. Do you want to read it? Let me? Let me do this all right?

So he's an English cabinet maker, so uh sorry, listeners, Here we go an entire new method of making and completing shoes, boots, splatter, dashes, clogs, and other articles by means and tools, and by means of tools and machines also invented by me for that purpose, and of certain compositions of the nature of Japan or Vanish, which will be very advantageous in many useful applications. End quote. Don't

you just feel like this is sewing? As described by a Monty Python sketch, It does feel like John Cleese is the person who needs to deliver that patent title. For me, it's Terry Jones, but we all have our favorite. That's fair. You went more Welsh. That's all right, something's fine with that. So he's actually describing three different machines in this pattern. Um, so the second of the three, which is why it's so crazy wordy, I mean Japan and varnish, which are the words used for like these

coding um methods have nothing to do with stitching. But it kind of lumped everything together. And he was a cabinet maker. I think maybe he didn't like to file a lot of paper. Yeah, it's probably one of those things where we thought, goodness, gracious, this is a lot of work. Let's let's just lump it all together. One very wordy document will cover me. So the second part of his patent was actually the one for stitching, and it really wasn't terribly practical. It had a lot of

components that we actually associate with modern showing machines. So it had the arm with the needle, it had continuous thread from a spool, uh, and it had a table set up that the cloth would sit on. And those all still persist in some form or another. But his is a case where there's no actual example of his machine having been built, although in eighteen seventy three Newton Wilson, who was from Great Britain, found the plans and he

did build this machine, but it did not work. And this is one of those ones that we talked about a little bit ago, where the suspicion is that he

didn't entirely disclose what he was getting. Leave a few things out of the patent design so that folks don't automatically go out there and actually start making one uh one thing about patents, By the way, there's no guarantee that your design has to work, and it has to it has to be reasonably you know, the people at the patent offices have to reasonably believe that you you believe it will work the way you've designed it. But you don't have to prove. Yeah, there's not a proofing

stage design. Yeah, you don't have to bring one in and say, well, here, let me put it in motion and show you that all the parts move the way I've described it in the patent. It really is just meant to prevent other people from making that same design without your permission. All right. Well, then in eight four we've got this story about Thomas Stone and James Henderson who were issued a patent in France for their own kind of sewing machine. Right. Yeah. It kind of created

an overcast stich. So if you don't know what that is, I do not. If you see like a situation where two pieces of cloth are bound together and there's a stitch that passes through each one and kind of spirals around the edges and then back through, that's an overcast all right, Um, so this was similar. It's also called a whip stitch when you do it by hand, so it was very simple. But it could work on all

different kinds of fabrics, and it was able to stitch curves. Okay, so it's not just a straight line like some of the other devices will be talking about. Correct, Like a lot of them will only go in a straight line, but this one could handle curves. The one big drawback of it, though, was that it did not have a continuous thread feed, so there was a lot of stopping and going and re threading of needles and fitting. So

it saved time. We think theoretically, I say that with a question mark on purpose, right, then may maybe it saves time for someone who just really hates the motion of actually making a stitch well, or if you're doing like large scale things like leathers and probably help. So that's same year you have John Duncan of Glasgow here patenting an embroidery machine, which is not quite the same thing as a stitching machine. Correct. I mean it does do stitches, but it's not the same sort of utilitarian

things that would hold together pants, right. Uh, they will just make the pants beautiful. I've learned that through a better experience. Uh. In seven we have Edward Walter Chapman and Walter Chapman. It's not confusing at all receiving a British patent three thousand, seventy eight. That's another thing that I think is interesting. You look at the history of sewing machines and you look at those patent numbers, and when they're still in the four digit range, that's incredible.

If guys go to the patent I'll go to like Google search for patents and look up any patent that's been issued over the last couple of years. We're talking in the millions here, Yeah, and this is when they were still in the thousands, which is pretty incredible. It really does show that the patent industry here was very young. Oh yeah, this was the one that I aloud a machine that had a needle that would not have to

pass all the way through the fabric. It could just puncture it, uh slightly and then pull back out and make the stitch that way, right, which is how modern machines still were for the most part. I think there's a couple of special tea machines that do different things. But yeah, so it had two needles. One, as you said, punched in and passed the thread down, another kind of shuttled through it, and then it got pulled back up. So um, continuous stitching via these two different thread feeds. Cool.

And then we have what my favorite name on our lists, one of my favorites eight thirty So it's Bartelomy Timonier. I love a good French name. Yeah, it's a great one. Is there's two th in there, and as I recall, that's a hard tea but I could be wrong. It is it is, and his machine made a chain stitch. And there are still machines very similar to this functioning today. They're not used a whole lot because it's one of those things. You may have even come across them periodically.

If you ever have like an article of thing it's maybe not super pricy, you may be bought it, you know, a cheap store, and you pull one thread and the whole thing starts coming out. That's often a chain stitch because it's the one thread holding everything together, so there's nothing stopping it from continuing to unravel. Right. So that's what I always get nervous now whenever I see a loose thread. And I'm more of a snipper than a than a tugger at this. I'm a yanker, but I

know I can fix it if it all goes right. Yeah, for me, it's it's fixing means going out and buying a new one. We'll come right back to our discussion about the Great Patent Wars and the sewing machine in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Well. I love about this story is it's interesting because it's a real life story that mirrors something that is um a popular misconception. And what I mean by that is in the story you have

Toumonier who had a shop in Paris, Uh. He had lots of these different machines, eighty of them working at a time, and Taylor's people who sewed by hand, stormed his store and destroyed some of the machinery because they didn't want to be put out of a job. And the reason why I say this is interesting is that there's a story that we have told on tech stuff before that is erroneous and uh. And in fact I

have been guilty of of pushing this forward. The idea of sabotage being named after sabo, as in the French word for shoe. The story is that you had uh. Often it was told about weavers who came in and threw their shoes into large mechanized looms in order to foul the workings and destroy them. As it turns out,

that's not necessarily true. The first the first appearance of the word sabotage doesn't come until in the written word, as far as I can tell, until which tells me that this incident, which happened in around the mid eighteen hundreds, could have given birth to a word involving tailors that would have replaced sabotage, and they just didn't capitalize on it. I wanted to include Timonier somehow Timony as I got totally Timoniate today at work in and they just ambushed me. Yeah.

So they came and destroyed his shop and he had to flee. And he did get financial backing, uh so that he could continue his work and develop new machines. But unfortunately, uh, and he got some additional patents as well, both in France and in Britain. But the revolution kind of caused his legacy to get put on the back burner. He turns out there were some important things that people were attending to at the time. Yeah, not so much

with the let's make machines. Now we've got an American inventor coming up next, so let's just take a moment to go America. Well, and he becomes very important in the patent battles, so as is Walter Hunt you're talking about here. Yeah. So he made a machine that it created a lock stitch used to thread sources, very similar to the bobbing and school method you would see on modern machines. Um and this you know, of course, was

different than the single thread chain stitch of Timoni. A successful machines and he kind of was a busy bee he had a lot of inventions going at the same time, and so it wasn't like this sewing machine was his baby and he had really put his heart and soul into it. He was kind of like, no, nobody's ever gonna be interested in this, and he sold it. So he sold the patent off to He didn't even have the patent. He just sold I go. That's why he

didn't even patent his invention. Yeah, I could use the money. He sold it to a man named George, a aerosmith and was basically like, yeah, well, you know, I'll fund some other projects with whatever I make off of this. It's not that important. Um. As we said, he comes up later and becomes very important to remember him. And we'll also point out his machine was one that Jonathan

referenced earlier that would only going straight lines. You couldn't really work curves with it, right, so that that certainly limits its usefulness. Uh. Now, we also have to acknowledge the fact that there's a challenge in really talking about the history of the sewing machine because of an event that happened in that the mid eighteen hundreds, early to mid eighteen hundreds. Yeah, we had a little bit of a fire in the patent office. Yeah, as it turns

out patents are flammable. Yes, no one had pended the the the not the inflammable that would also be flammable, but the impossible to burn patent. Yeah, And it wasn't a time where they were making tons of backups. It was kind of like, you file it and you go on your way. Because we're still in the thousands, they haven't really gotten their game figured out yet, right, not to mention the fact that they're making Making duplicates is no easy task at this time, so they thought, well,

it's safe enough. Yeah, that fire was in eighteen thirty six, so they really did not have a plan in place to keep duplicate copy. And as a consequence, there are actually a lot some sources will say that there are a lot of kind of partial patent documents that still exists that like they mentioned a needle, or they mentioned something sewing related, but like the attribution portion of the document has been too damaged and they don't know who filed it. So there could be families out there that

could have, for all we know, inherited great wealth. But we'll never know because the capriciousness of fire robbed them of their place in history. Fire and it's ways possibly on Martha's vineyard. In eighteen forty two, we've got John J. Greenoff, who is the first guy, first American, to get a patent for the sewing machine that we have a record

of anyway. Um, So even though he made his invention after Hunt had, Hunt had not patented it, And as you have in your notes here, the aerosmith apparently never got around the patenting it either. So, uh, this is the first one in the American patent system. Yeah, he there was no replication of his He basically kind of was one and done. Yes, so he made a prototype and then not a production model. Yeah, there's we don't know if he didn't get funding or he just abandoned

the idea and moved on to something else. But it was only a year later when the second US patent for a sewing machine came about, and that was issued to Benjamin W. Bean which is a great name, I know. Um, and he created a unique development and that his machine was the first that actually fed the fabrics through gears. So for the stitchers in the house, all three of us. Um, that's similar to feed dogs. And if you don't stitch what a feed dog is. If you've ever looked at

the sewing machine, you may see these two. They almost look like little feet that come up and kind of kick at your fabric as you're sewing, and they have rigid edges and that's kind of pulling your fabric through as you go right, so you don't have to put through as much effort, you don't have to worry about misguiding the fabric. So it helps feed the fabric through as you're stitching. Yes, sometimes it creates great drama and

it eats fabric, but not very often. Um and his also had a clamp mechanism to attach it to a table, so that was also a new development. Uh, and there's still machines made that do that. Also that year, in eighteen forty three, we got George H. Corliss, who uh you know, he was also a busy body making making a steam engine. That's pretty cool. We did a full

episode in Tech Stuff on steam engine. So if you guys are are big into that and you really want to know about the development of the steam engine, here's a here's an interesting little effect. The original steam engines didn't push with steam. They rather would pull by letting steam condense and create a vacuum, thus pulling a piston down rather than pushing a piston out. But we go into full detail and tech stuff, so I don't need to redo the whole thing. This pretty cool stuff. It

is exciting. It's actually not cool, it's actually quite hot. But ump. So Corliss had what's considered the third u S sewing machine patents. His performed what is called a saddle stitch, which is a specialized stitch that's used to this day to join leather together. Uh, it kind of

keeps it all stable. If anybody has ever tried to sew with leather, if you've had like a leather pouch or anything, Uh, it can present some challenges in terms of how it because it's so rugged usually and tough, it will chew on threads and or even if you have a lacing lacing even though it's leather, also we'll kind of get chewed up over time. So a saddle stitch kind of gives you a tighter stitch and it

prevents some of that friction. Okay. Cool, And then also just a year later, in eighteen forty four, we've got James Rogers getting the fourth US sewing machine pen And you may all wonder why we're covering every single patent. The pen wars will make all clear. Everybody's gonna be really apparent, and I mean, it's it's it's important because again we're trying to illustrate the fact that a lot of these patents were not revolutionary devices that completely reinvented

the machine. They were sometimes incremental improvements that had a remarkable difference from earlier machines, but it was one tiny element, right, not necessarily a full reworking. Yeah, so yeah, James Rogers patent was really only had a tiny change to Bean's design, and that was that the gears were kind of in a different place and that allowed him to be able to design a different needle that was shaped a little

more simply and would be easier to replicate. Um. And so pretty much every patent that came after this used this simpler setup that built on Bean's design. So I really set a precedent here. But now we're going to the start of the show. Okay, who's the star of the show because not being a big sewing machine guy, but you watched Schoolhouse Rock growing up, right, I did he was in it was he? Yeah? In the Mother Necessity episode, I'll have to go watch my DVDs, theres alias,

can you help me with my sewing? So it's an alias here we're talking and about Elias Howe Jr. Yes, all right, And there's even a play on his name where he tells her he's gonna fix everything and she says Alias how And it's very witty to the sewing nerds in right, all three of youth. So Elias Howe was born in Spencer, Massachusetts in eighteen nineteen. Uh, and when he was a teenager, he decided to go and seek his fortune as a machinist, which was a brand

new job in the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, he was kind of he had some bravado. He was not afraid of kind of breaking out on his own and making his way in the world. He certainly didn't appear to be shy once we get into the back noors. Now, he was a very smart man. Yeah, so he's going to Uh he ends up as a machinist overhearing some talk about the idea of of a sewing machine and starts to kind of apply his own ingenuity. How would I

achieve this sort of thing. So he's important to remember, yeah, and he um So he was granted the fifth U S. Patent in September of eighteen forty six. And it's one of those things that I have to laugh because every year when September comes around, you see the today on this day, Alias how invented the sewing machine, and I'm like,

back up the truck. Not entirely accurate, right, It's like like you know, as An invented the light bulb, all right, No, as an improved and not a Eureka moment where it comes from nowhere, although he did sometimes say that like he had it kind of fully universally on his own. It's very tesla like to um So. This was patent number four thousand, seven fifty in the United States. You know, the previous one we gave. The number two was the British patent. So in both cases you see that these

are very very early on during the patent offices existence. Yeah, they're numbering schemes were kind of neck and neck in terms of where they were at in terms of um uh accession order. Um So, this patent was actually his second version of the machine that he patented he had another prototype a year before that was capable of sewing, but he um, he fine tuned it a little bit more.

And house patent is very important because it makes five very specific claims about how the machine is going to work, and they come up a lot in court battles like yeah, so this is where I was talking about how you can make claims within a patent and those claims will protect elements of your invention. And claims can be everything from specific physical uh mechanical ways that the machine works

to UH specific method like an implementation. We see that today in ways that are are less um they're they're more difficult to understand because if you're talking about a physical machine, you can say the physical machine does it in this way, and you can see whether or not

the machine is actually doing it in that way. When we talk about today, we're talking about stuff like you know, resizing images by pinching or or moving your fingers further apart from each other, and it starts to get a little wibbly wobbly time you whiney when you are trying to say, oh, well, this is this is a method that is unique that I came up with, and no one else can use it unless they come through me. That's it's one of those evolutions of the patent office

that we're still trying to kind of reconcile. Yeah, it's not all black and white, which is why you get into these huge battles and arguments and things go to court, and you hear about Apple having to pay money, but then Samsung has to fail the money right, and sometimes they just sometimes everyone just ends up like, well, let's just all say we gave each other the money we were supposed to and call today. But anyway, there were these five elements. Did you want to cover any of them?

You have all of them written out here are and they're written out long because I cut and pasted it from another document. I'll kind of do the short version. Okay. So the first was he describes how he's going to form a seam by using a curve needle to go through the cloth and a bobbin to kind of connect to that and and make the stitch, similar to how we've talked about before this to thread version. The second is how this thread is going to get lifted and

pass through the needle eye. There's a lifting rod involved that's very important. The third is how the thread is going to be passed out by the shuttle, so it has a lot to do with the tension and how it passes through at a consistent rate. The fourth is um how a couple of levers go together and enact their sort of mechanisms on the string or the thread

that's involved. And the fifth is how the cloth is held in place by a baster plate, uh, which is still a thing that happens like now, if you drop your foot down on your machine, it's kind of pressing the cloth onto the plate of your machine, and that's that keeps it from going just flying away when you're trying to stitch on it very important as I understand it,

in the sewing process. Yes, most machines made today won't won't stitch at all if you don't have the press your foot down because they know they'll just be wasting everyone's time. So how didn't meet with immediate success with this design? Actually, he tried for a while to get people here in the United States excited about it, and

no one seemed to really give him much attention. So he ended up selling the patent rights to a or at least the British patent rights, I should say to William Thomas for the princely sum of two fifty British pounds sterling. Uh and uh, I like, I like the other. Note here He also adapted his machine to make umbrellas and corsets. That's fabulous. Yeah, I mean, I'm in the

market are both right now? So well, when we talked about this on History, Tracy was saying, I never thought about it before, but umbrellas, of course, it's really are quite a lot alike, and that you know, you have a casing and should have these rigid elements that passed through it and hold it all in shape. And at this point it would have been all deal bone, course tree.

So it was very similar to an umbrella, right, except that the main difference, at least in my experience, is that it's a relief to have an umbrella and a relief to get rid of a courset. Don't get it started. Of courses are good for you if they're well fitted. They protect your back, they give you a great posture. Those tight lasers are a whole different universe. Yeah. I worked at the Georgia Renaissance Festival, so I have a

very specific experience of watching ladies. A good foundation courset will keep your clothes in place that holds up all those Victorian layers if it's a Victorian courset. So I'm kind of going from the time period we're talking about. They're they're not mystery torture devices. Well really were not

intended for that. You will clearly need to have you come in and give a talk because because those ladies, let me tell there is a lot of technology and physics and of course I'm got to support from below or from above. It's fabulous. Well, moving on in the the evolution of the sewing machine, we move up to and the six you wes sewing machine patent from John A. Bradshaw,

which was a little bit snarky, was it. Yeah? He talks about how is patent design his patent and kind of says that it's bungling and it's an incumbrance to the action of the machine when he talks about the needle. So not only can how not get manufacturers interested in his device, he has the next uh patent UH petitioner

completely dis him totally trash in his work. Even while he's building on it, he's still kind of like he was onto something but I I really have this thing figured out, Like, okay, well I can tell you why it didn't do great when the manufacturers wonderful. So et nine we get how coming back to the United States. Uh, he had gone to England, like we said to say,

to sell the British patent off. And when he comes back he sees that that that what had been kind of a quiet, little tiny niche industry was starting to take off. Yeah. The seventh patent for the sewing machine have been issued to Charles Morey and Joseph B. Johnson in eighteen forty nine, and they were really some of the first two that were like, we need to start selling this and making a bunch of them. And even before they received their patent, they were selling machine, which

is perfectly fine. I mean, it's not like you don't have to have a In fact, you often we'll see today things like patent pending where people are trying to capitalize on an idea because patent applications and patent grants can take a long time, especially today now that you have uh, you know, an exponentially larger number of applications coming into the patent office than you did way back

in the mid eighteen hundreds. Yeah, there were some other people that were trying to improve on Marie and Johnson's machine in the middle of eighteen forty nine. So that same year they got their patent, there was a man named Jotham s Conan, and he was issued a patent based on a modification he made to their machine which just kind of altered the way that the cloth was held during the stitching. But his never really went anywhere.

He didn't manufacture, he didn't sell. But that same day that he got his patent, another important person was getting a patent, John Batch Elder. So yeah, this was the continuous sewing mechanism and at an endless belt to feed the cloth into the machine. Yeah, thank you, John, to make sure that you don't have to put in all that work yourself. Yeah, But the really important thing is who Batch Older sold his patent too. And here we come up to the first name in this podcast that

I recognize. I am Singer the Singer sewing machine. Everybody knows that one. Well, I mean, you know, my my my grandmother and my my mom both had Singer sewing machines. In fact that there's the both of them still exist and my parents. It's a it's like a little uh table that's next to the front door of their house. But it's an old Singer sewing machine that that's operated by by pedal. Uh So, yeah, it's it's the one of those names that I think most people associate it

with sewing. Pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, because I mean it's still a name. So yep, they're still making you don't hear about a lot of how machines these days. The singers still going. We have a little bit more to say about the Singer sewing machine and patents, but before we get to that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. We finally reached the point now where things have come to ahead. We've got the the snippy little patent applications out of the way. Now it's time

to really get down to fisticuffs legally speaking. And uh it's the eighteen fifties where we get that first enormous patent war. And it all has to do with the fact that these different little elements that have been improved upon over time, there were a lot of arguments about who actually had ownership of those ideas and in what implementations, and who was owed money by whom, and it got ugly,

really really ugly. So there was a a man by the name of Allan B. Wilson, and he in eighteen fifty was working on this lockstitch machine very similar to the modern machine, and his mechanism could also go forward and backwards, which we had not encountered before. Uh, And he applied for his patent. He had made a second prototype model and the people that owned the brad Shop patent from eight got wind of this, and we're like, hold on a minute. For four Uh, we owned some

of the concepts you're using. The double pointed shuttle that made up a part of his machine was something that was part of their patent, uh, they claimed, And that claim was not accurate. It was complete bunk. So however, they think, well, let's throw a wrench into this one. However, they had all ers and Wilson didn't, so he could

not fight them. So we get down to using the old idea of well, if if we can't, if we can't suppress this idea, one way, we can just kind of run them out because we've got we've got a larger reserve of cash. Yes, so uh, he had to give up half of his claim to a p Kline and Edward Lee, who at that point held the Bradshaw patent, and that was in late eighteen fifty in November, and then after a little while he just sold them the rest of his interest. He didn't want to mess with

it anymore. He retained very limited rights. That's a very sad story there where he essentially he was beaten down. Yeah, he really had the goods in terms of his invention to have been the singer of this story in terms of name recognition, but because he just didn't have the means to fight anybody that made a claim against him and vanished into history and to resulted to the wound.

He would use his name in official advertisements. Yeah, people recognize that he had invented something really pretty exciting because it could do these things that previous machines couldn't, And so their advertisements went A B. Wilson's sewing machine, the best and only practical sewing machine, not larger than a ladies workbox, for the trifling sum of thirty five dollars.

So not only does he not get the benefit of actually owning this device that he invented, he then has the indignity of having his name used in the advertising while this other company makes money off of it. Yeah, he really did get shafted. So meanwhile, we've got to lie as how who He's no dummy, No, he's witnessing this and realizing some stuff is going down. Maybe I need to kind of circle my little my proverbial wagons here. So he decides that he's going to protect the rights

to royalties from his inventions. Uh, and anything that could trace elements of the products being sold back to one of his patents, right, Yeah, and from the Branshaw model on. They really were working on How's machine and kind of making twee tweaks to that. Uh. And then he really got angry because he saw Isaac Singer's one of Isaac Singer's sons, demonstrating their sewing machine. Yeah, and uh he said, huh, some of these elements look awfully familiar. So of course

he ends up doing the responsible thing, you know. He contacts Singer and says, um, actually, I own the patent for this this machinery, this particular piece that you're using, and so by law, um I should really receive a royalty payment because you're you're using it in your device and otherwise not not compensating me for it, and so um, I'd really like that two thousand dollars the oh Me and Singer, being the very level headed professional businessman, Uh

decided to um physically threaten How Yeah he Uh. Singer was known for a a really bad temper. He did some really seedy things just in business outside of this, and when it came to this, there was one incident where he allegedly threatened and nearly threw How down the

steps outside his office. Like there were fisticuffs. It wasn't just yelling and through lawyers, they were physically I get the feeling that Singer is very much like the character from from Parts of the Caribbean who just says, you know, they're more like Guideline. It's he's he's not not really one to necessarily be too concerned with the actual rules of law. You know, that actor that plays Jackmi Gibb would make a great Isaac Singer. He would. But How

did a super smart thing. This is where we really realized that this man was just really smart and very widely so. He, like some of these previous sad stories, really didn't have a lot of money to get into a lot of legal battles, but he figures out a way to finance some litigation. He sells half of his interest in his patent to a man named George Bliss, and Bliss manufactured machines. He built them as being House patent, even though they were pretty different from House initial design.

But the money that how made off of this partnership was basically put into his litigation machine and he just started fighting people. Oh got you So, So what he was doing was he had made this partnership. He was making money off the partnership. Bliss is making money because of Howe's name. How is making money because of the partnership with Bliss. He ends up spending that money directly on lawyers to attack people who are actually infringing upon

his patents. Yeah, he went after Singer with great vigor, But there were a lot of other people that were also in this mix. Uh, two of them Laroux and Blodgett. That we're a pair, that we're making a firm, that we're making machines that he thought infringed. There was actually a judgment in that case in House Favor that was the first one to be settled, and once it it was like the first of the dominoes, because then everybody else kind of panic. He went, oh, wow, he really

has a case. Right, when you've got a precedent set like that, then the the it becomes clear that's going to get harder and harder to win a case. Uh. You know when a defense against such a claim. If a claim has already been held up in court in one instance, then the fear is that it will be the same in future ones. And it's cheaper to settle it is to to go through the process and then maybe have to be forced to hand over a larger

reward in a court decision. Yeah, and how is basically happy to any settlements be like, okay, let's set up a license. Like he was willing to deal with them. It wasn't like he wanted to prevent other people from making their machine. This is very different from today when we were talking about similarities. But today we got a

lot of what we call them patentrols. These are the folks who will get a patent and then either they don't make anything on their own, or they make something very very tiny, and then they just kind of sit around and wait for folks to infringe upon them. They threatened litigation in hopes of a sttlement um. But but what a lot of people have said about the recent patent wars is that the patent system needs to create an incentive for patent holders to license their ideas for royalties,

which is exactly what hal was doing back in this day. Yeah, I mean he really saw the benefit of like, hey, it would be a pain, and it took us for me to set up my own manufacturing plant and be churning these out. But all these people are already set up. I can just cut deals with them. Everybody wins. Yeah, except not so much. No, No, I got it got ugly again. Apparently Singer was not done. Yeah, he didn't settle, and so that case dragged on. Yeah, and it got

ugly in public. To write, You've got this great little story about to to advertisements that ran on the same page of the New York Daily Tribune that tell very different stories. Yeah, the first one reads the sewing machine. It has been recently decided by the United States Court that Alias had Junior of number three zero five Broadway was the originator of the sewing machine now extensively used. Call it his office and see forty of them in

constant use upon cloth, whether, etcetera. And judge for yourselves as to their practicality. Also see a certified copy from the records of the United States Court of the injunction against Singers machine so called, which is conclusive. You that want sewing machines be cautious how you purchase them of others than him or those licensed under him, else the law will compel you to pay twice over. Meanwhile, we

have the other advertisement sewing machines. For the last two years, Elias how Junior of Massachusetts, has been threatening suits and injunctions against all the world who make use or sells sewing machines. We have sold many machines, are selling them rapidly, and have good right to sell them. The public do not acknowledge Mr Howe's pretensions, and for the best reasons. One machines made a core into house patent are of no practical use. He tried several years without being able

to introduce one too. It is notorious, especially in New York, that how was not the original inventor of the machine combining the needle and shuttle, and that his claim to that is not valid. Finally, we make and sell the best sewing machines. So yeah, there's there's some vitriolic I love how It's it's like a sewing machine telenovela. There's a lot of soap opera going on here. And to make it even more soap opera ish, How went after

Singer for libel. But he also went after the New York Daily Tribune for printing his advertisement in the first place. So we now have How going after Singer both for patent infringement and for libel. Yeah, fantastic, just to make their relationship that much more delightful and huggy. So at this point Singer, Singer wakes up and just says, you know, you know you were right. I was wrong. I'm I'm gonna be the bigger man walk away right, not even a little. He instead just kind of goes into a

rage suitable to be played only by Daniel day Lewis. Besides, he's going to destroy house Bill totally. He decides he is going to seek out every scrap of evidence on earth. He even sought out sources in Europe and China to prove that house design was not original. Uh. And the key here is that the wording in House patent was really his protection because he had patented the combination of the shuttle and the one I and the I pointed

needle and how they would work together. But he never claimed to have invented either of those elements, and so his patent remained accurate and correct and not infringing on anyone else because he didn't say I invented the needle at the shuttle. He said I invented this combination of these two elements that work in this particular way. Correct,

and that is completely valid patent law. So again, if you come up with a new way to use existing technology that you you can claim as an improvement over others, there's nothing stopping you from getting a patent on that. Yeah, you can patent an interaction of things. They don't have

to be physical things necessarily. However, if you remember back when we talked about Walter Hunt, who was the guy who invented a pretty workable sewing machine but then kind of sold it off and abandoned it, Yeah, he never

he never patented his particular idea. Singer found him, of course, because he thought that was his best shot at bringing HOW down and showing that HOW is not in fact, the first person to invent a working sewing machine, so he I guess he just wanted to retroactively magically get a precursor patent that couldn't have existed because William Hunt never patented his detention. That is exactly what he tried

to do. So this this reminds me. I mean, they're their entire books written about some of the more ridiculous things that have happened in patent law around the world, but particularly in the United States. So another good example of some shenanigans that went on with patents involves Tesla and Radio. Because Tesla was awarded the patent the United States uh the same year that Marconi actually filed for

a patent. In fact, he received the patent a month before or two months before Marconi had filed for a patent in the US, and then famously, several years later the Patent Office awarded they went back on their decision, took the patent away from Tesla and awarded it to Marconi. So even though that happens later, you know this this the events we're talking about here are earlier in the timeline. It's not unusual for us to see these kind of

crazy political dealings. Yeah, and again remembered, Uh, you know, this wasn't a time when everything was duplicated and there was a trail of what had happened, when it would be easy to fudge things. So it's it's reasonable that Singer could think that he was going to finagle something out of this. So what what happens due to this this claim? Well, first Singer hires an engineer, William Whiting, uh,

to basically help resurrect Hunts designs. He's gonna go back to those original blueprints and schematics and he's going to build it to prove that this one works and it's great. And how you got nothing? Uh? And uh. The Scientific American at the time, as this was all bubbling up, actually published a pretty um scathing article about Hunt asserting because he was like, oh yeah, I did him at the sewing machine. Now that he sees that there's money

in it and this is a litigious thing. They basically said that his claims were rusty, He didn't he had no hat in this game. What was he trying to do? Legal basis? Really, but there was a trial at the Patent Office. There were hundreds of pages of testimony. I mean, it went on forever ing or dragged everybody in that he could think of that had ever touched anything that

vaguely resembled the sewing machine. UM Patent Commissioner Charles Mason the ruled in favor of Elias Howe on eighteen fifty four, and the big part of Hunt's loss, even though he really did have a pretty good working machine, was that he didn't do anything to patent it or protected eighteen years prior. So, Uh, the Patent office can't can't rule in favor of someone who hasn't actually gone through the process. Yeah, yeah, the commissioner is equit. Are you trying to do? You

didn't You don't have these rights. Hunt did try to appeal to the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, but that did not go so well either. Mason's ruling was upheld. So then how emboldened by this victory, decides to start going after other people that he has has perceived as infringing against his patents. Yep, everybody that was selling a singer machine he went after. Wow, that was a lot of people, and he asked for preliminary injunctions against all of them to shut down sales while they

went through their court cases. So he goes through this process, bringing it all the way to courts when necessary. Um, and the they what the poor singer at this point, not not really poor singer because he's kind of a jerk, but but you've got you've got how going after the people who are selling singer sewing machines, are incorporating them. Then what they're doing instead, you know, they get attacked by how they turned around. They attack singers saying, you

got us into this. Yeah, you had no right to sell us the licenses that you sold us because you didn't have a right to it. You didn't own the technology that you were licensing to us, and and that's why we're in trouble. So it's so liticious. By eighteen fifty four, keep in mind this started in the in the eighteen fifty By eighteen fifty four, Singer and how settle their lawsuit and it's announced in Scientific American. This

is a big Yeah, this is not tiny news. This is like this is just like when you go on to Google News and you see like Samsung and Apple settle lawsuits. That's equivalent. Yeah, it's kind of like it reminds me of when those first like headlines were happening about no Steve Jobs and Bill Gates actually like each other. It's fine, it's like that level of wait, what we didn't think that's how this worked, except there was very little pushing down of stairs in any of them. Right, well,

what what's really cool about this? Okay, so this didn't end all litigation. There was still some continuing on. But by eighteen fifties six, we get the president of Grover and Baker, which was one of the companies involved in the suits, that were, uh, that we're evolving, Elias How, I feel like we should back up because we skipped that. People tried to then sue How for improving Uh yeah, so How basically at this point was the you know,

the czar of the sewing machine in industry. He owned the patent to the biggest chunk of it and was licensing those out, and he thought, well, you know, I could really tweak that original design as well. But every tweak he made other people claim they had already made. So then he was getting sued by people for patent

infringement for improving on his original design. Okay, so now's the litigation festival Basically, now you've got people saying, all right, well, these improvements you're making, we've already made and we've already patented.

So it's become a huge mess. By eighteen fifty six, you get the president of Grover and Baker, which was one of the companies that was involved in these cases against how about these improvements to the original designs and comes up with a concept called the combination, which, by

the way, these days we would call this a patent pool. Yeah, and a patent pools essentially when you get a whole bunch of different stakeholders who all own different patents that are involved in the same general technology to essentially come to an agreement saying, all right, we're gonna pull all these patents together, and as long as we are all officially part of this group and we all agree to operate by these rules, we're not going to sue the

pants off each other whenever we make an improvement to that technology or incorporate that technology into our products. Yes, make suring that everyone's getting the royalties that they deserve. Exactly. So. The president of Grover and Baker was Orlando B. Potter, and he, you know, I feel like He's a person that's not very well known historically, but he really deserves a lot of kudos because he was really the first person to go, hey, you guys, we're only hurting ourselves.

We're kind of being idiots. And he really established this concept of what is now a patent pool. Uh. So he was like, let's stop, you know, holding up everybody's production. Let's stop throwing our money at lawyers. We don't need that. We can work this out. Uh. And so he got them all to join their forces. They pulled their patents, they made one unified combination patent for sewing machines. How

initially was not on board with this. Well, now, when you own a huge chunk of the landscape, than you feel like you have the most to lose in that kind of agreement. He definitely felt that way, but eventually he did agree to it. He had made some pretty heavy stipulations and the other parties agreed. Basically, he was going to get a five dollar royalty on every sewing machine that was sold in the US, and for every

sewing machine that was exported he would get a dollar. Now, I remember this is in eighteen fifty six, so these are not paltry sums. This is this is a significant money. So in the next eleven years between eighteen fifty six in eighteen sixty seven, when How's Patton expired, he made more than two million dollars And that's two million dollars in eighteen hundreds money. Yeah, that's way more. But he would be a kajillionaire, crazy crazy, that's accurate estimation there um.

And he requested a an extension to that patent but was denied. Patents do, like I said earlier, expire, and when they expire, you lose that exclusivity. You cannot demand licenses for it. That technology, that implementation of that technology then belongs to the public, so anyone can create any kind of device using that sort of approach um that was originally covered by that patent that's now expired. So he doesn't get the extension he wanted, and he dies

of a broken heart. He doesn't really die of a broken heart. His heart was broken earlier in his life when his wife died, but it did not kill him to the best of our knowledge. However, some say that it did kind of spur his because he just needed

to focus on something else. Um. But singer of course continued to work his magic in the sewing machine industry, and now as a consequence, you know, he's really the name we remember more than a lie us how Yeah, yeah, you see that name all over the He was exceptional at marketing, very much again, kind of like Edison, who was brilliant in many ways, and one of the big was that he was a very smart businessman and marketer. So yeah, this is again you can see the parallels

with modern patent wars. Everything from the cooperation of various companies to make sure that business can continue, the arguments that patent litigation harms innovation, that that patent that's sitting on patent's harms innovation. These are not new ideas. No, you gotta look at you know, early to mid nineteenth century and you can see it all there as well. So very interesting that there's so much in common with what we see today. Guys, thank you for joining me

on this classic episode of tax stuff. I hope you found it as fascinating as I did. It always is interesting to me to see how these older technologies actually ended up having some very interesting modern problems associated with them, like this whole patent war situation. If you guys would like me to discuss any particular topic. Maybe it's a technology or a company or a person that in tech that you think is really important. Maybe you want me to have a specific guest on as either an interview

or a co host. Let me know. Send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on Twitter or Facebook the handle of both of those tech stuff hs W. Remember you can follow us on Instagram and you can join me live when I record this show on Wednesdays and Fridays. Just go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com