How Singer Won the Sewing Machine War
The Singer Sewing Machine changed the way America manufactured textiles, but the invention itself was less important than the company’s innovative business
Today, where the concept of “disruption” has become so popular in business, those developing apps and new startups can look to the Singer Sewing Machine as one of the original disruptive technologies. (National Museum of American History)
The Singer sewing machine revolutionized the way the world created and repaired its fabric, and transformed not only the textile industry, but also global business itself. But a closer look at the Singer patent model, which is on display as part of the American Enterprise show at the National Museum of American History, proves that the machine’s success was not just a matter of a brilliant invention whose time had come.
“Most Americans think that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door,” says the museum’s Peter Liebhold, one of the curators of the new exhibition. “In fact, that’s not true. If you build a better mousetrap, it could sit and rot in the corner of your garage.”
For one thing, Isaac Merritt Singer could hardly claim to have invented the sewing machine. It was Elias Howe who created the original sewing-machine concept and patented it in 1846, charging exorbitant licensing fees to anyone trying to build and sell anything similar. But Singer—an eccentric entrepreneur, actor and father of about two dozen children from different partners—came upon a few ways to improve Howe’s model, such as a thread controller, and combining a vertical needle with a horizontal sewing surface.
The company’s early advertising claims boasted of many superlatives, including “always ready.” (Corbis)
Singer patented his version of the machine in 1851 and formed I.M. Singer & Co., but by then a handful of other inventors had made their own patented improvements to Howe’s original concept, including the addition of a barbed needle and a continuous feeding device among other enhancements. Together all these innovations created what lawyers call a “patent thicket,” in which a number of parties can lay claim to key parts of an invention. It sparked the Sewing Machine War.
“People were suing each other and burning up their resources, fighting each other rather than developing the machine itself,” Liebhold says. Adding in the high licensing fees manufacturers had to pay, building a better mousetrap seemed hardly worth the investment.
That was when Orlando Brunson Potter, a lawyer and the president of rival manufacturer Grover and Baker Sewing Machine Company proposed an unprecedented idea: the factions could merge their business interests. Since a powerful and profitable machine required parts covered by several different patents, he proposed an agreement that would charge a single, reduced licensing fee that would then be divided proportionally among the patent holders.
A scale-model of the Singer Tower is included in the museum’s exhibition. The company’s central headquarters in Manhattan’s financial district was one of the first corporate skyscrapers in the country and, for about a year, the tallest building in the world. (Jacyln Nash, National Museum of American History)
Howe, Singer, Grover and Baker and manufacturers Wheeler and Wilson were all eventually convinced of the wisdom of the idea, and together they created the first “patent pool.” It merged nine patents into the Sewing Machine Combination, with each of the four stakeholders given a percentage of the earnings on every sewing machine, depending on what they contributed to the final design.
“Though the pool combined nine patents thought to be essential for a high-quality sewing machine, three of them were particularly crucial,” explains Ryan Lampe, associate professor at California State University, East Bay, who has co-written (with Stanford University Assistant Professor Petra Moser) several articles on patent pools and the Singer case in particular. He lists these as “Elias Howe’s patent on the lockstitch, Wheeler and Wilsons’ patent on the four-motion feed, and Singer’s patent on the combination of a vertical needle with horizontal sewing surface.”
Read the full story at Smithsonian.