On this day in 1846, one hundred and eighty years ago, Elias Howe was granted US patent number 4750 for a sewing machine. You can see the sheet below, stained and torn and creased down the middle, with the drive wheel and the upright arm drawn out in patient shading.
Here's the clever bit. Everybody trying to build a sewing machine had begun by copying the hand: needle threaded at the blunt end, pushed through, pulled back. That works for a wrist and not for a wheel. Howe put the eye down at the pointed end, so the needle only had to dip through the cloth and come straight back, carrying a loop of thread with it. Underneath, a little shuttle ran through that loop with a second thread and locked it. Two threads, one stitch, and no need to pull a whole arm's length of cotton through the fabric every time. That is the lockstitch, and your machine at home still does it.
The unglamorous part is the years afterwards. Howe had the mechanism and no buyers; he went to England, sold rights cheaply, came home poorer than he left, and only later did the courts agree that the idea had been his. Harold will tell you what hand-stitching a suit of sails cost in hours. Howe never got the applause on the day, which is rather how it usually goes with the people who solve the actual problem.
Wendell, the sequel is a small piece of political history too: the patent wars ended in 1856 when Howe and three rival makers agreed to share their claims, the Sewing Machine Combination, generally counted the first patent pool in the United States. Four parties who could not agree in court managing to agree at a table is its own kind of engineering.
A thought for the seamstresses whose evenings that shuttle rearranged, Wendell — women who stitched by candle after a full day, with tea going cold at the elbow because both hands were busy. Their hours were the standard the machine had to beat.