A 'Scalawag' Inventor and Your Sewing Machine
Aug. 12, 1851
Like most inventors, Isaac Singer was more of a "scalawag" than a businessman.
He wasn't necessarily a serious inventor like Thomas Edison. He happened to have a gift for tinkering with machines and developing improvements, but he had no marketing smarts (or interests), and his inventions were intended to fuel his acting career.
So, when Singer began tinkering with the first sewing machine, he didn't exactly start with a blank slate.
Elias Howe had already invented the sewing machine. He had a sense that it was going to be a great product, so he patented it in 1846 and charged exorbitant licensing fees to anyone hoping to enter the industry alongside him.
Singer (and a few others) didn't really care. Howe's original design had left much to be desired. Singer patented his brand-new design on Aug. 12, 1851, and formed I.M. Singer & Co. to market the new machine. Then he and everyone else working to improve the design set about suing one another.
By the time the contenders met in Albany, New York, with lawyers to sort out precisely who was suing whom, it looked like it would turn into an expensive and extended legal battle in court. Hoping to avoid years of litigation, one lawyer suggested that they pool all their licenses, create one machine, and all get royalties from every sale of that machine.
That seemed like a decent idea, so the inventors did, and by 1860, Singer's company was producing 13,000 machines.
The secret to Singer's success was that he didn't run the company. In fact, Singer was pushed out of management entirely by his company's co-founder, Edward Clark.
If Singer was an innovator of machines, Clark was a brilliant innovator when it came to marketing. Not only did he employ a veritable army of door-to-door salesmen whose job was to convince the average American that she could spend $10 ($339 in today's currency) on a machine, he came up with the idea of an installment-purchase plan, which allowed a much larger percentage of Americans to afford the machines in the first place.
Singer's sewing machine company was so popular, both in the United States and internationally, that it became the first company to build its own skyscraper, Singer Tower (which, at 612 feet, was the tallest building in the world for about a year).
By the time he died, Isaac Singer was one of the wealthiest men in America, and his machines had revolutionized the textile industry. Not only did thousands of Americans have sewing machines in their homes, but industrial versions had made cheap mass-produced clothing and the department store concept a possibility.
Great article!