Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/825

SEWING MACHINE 799 copper cylinders heated to a high degree, and the whole working in covered jackets. A thin layer of sewage is taken on at each turn of the cylinder, and by its heat is converted into dry poudrette, which is scraped off by a knife at the end of one revolution, and falls into a trough. No water is used in the house closets except the urine. The pipes being closed below and ventilated above, effluvia cannot escape into the houses, and there is no escape of sewer gas anywhere but at the central station under the furnace fires. The system, although em- bracing considerable outlay, is said to be not only self-supporting, but profitable, and to be extending over Europe. See F. 0. Krepps, " The Sewage Question " (London, 1867) ; Bald- win Latham, "Sanitary Engineering" (Lon- don, 1873) ; and Dr. Whitty, " On the Water Supply and Sewerage of Jerusalem." SEWING MACHINE, a mechanical contrivance for uniting fabrics by means of needle and thread. The earliest inventions for this pur- pose were attempts to imitate hand sewing, making a running through-and-through stitch with but a needleful of thread. This being impracticable in consequence, among other de- fects, of the wearing of the thread, it was sought to produce the old crochet stitch by means of machinery. The first needle suitable for use in sewing machines was introduced by Charles F. Weisenthal, to whom a patent was granted in England June 24, 1755. It was pointed at both ends, with an eye in the mid- dle, for passing each way through the cloth without being turned around ; but it was only used for hand embroidery. The first applica- tion of machinery was contained in a patent to Robert Alsop in England, dated March 22, 1770, for embroidering in a loom with one, two, or more shuttles. Machine embroidery with a large number of needles was patent- ed by John Duncan, May 30, 1804. He used hooked needles, attached in a straight line to a horizontal bar, the forward motion of which carried all the hooked ends through the cloth, when, on being supplied with thread by a feed- ing needle, the reverse motion carried back loops which passed through and secured those of the previous stitch. Patterns were worked by a sliding motion of the fabric with its ver- tical frame. This was the first important step in embroidering machinery, which was carried to great perfection in the machine of Heil- mann. This however used Weisenthal's two- pointed needle with the eye in the middle, and also nippers to pull the needle through, after- ward used by Greenough. There has lately been found in the archives of the English pat- ent office a patent for a sewing machine made by Thomas Saint, dated July 17, 1790, which has excited considerable interest and surprise in consequence of its possessing many of the elements of successful modern sewing ma- chines. This might have been used to some extent for sewing leather, but could not have succeeded with woven fabrics containing fibres, 735 VOL. xiv. 51 for they would have been caught in the forked needle by which the thread was pushed through. It was intended, as the patent states, " for quilting, stitching, and making shoes and oth- er articles by means of tools and other ma- chines." It had an arm, upon the overhanging end of which there was a vertically reciproca- ting straight needle. The arm also supported a spool which gave out its thread continuously. It had a horizontal cloth plate, made a chain or crochet stitch, and had thread tighteners above and below. In fig. 1, representing this machine, a is the bed plate, I an upright post bearing a horizontal overhanging arm, upon the end of which are placed a needle /and an awl ^, which were adjusted by means of set screws, and moved by cams h and i, on the shaft Ic. The needle was notched at its low- er end, to push the thread through the hole made by the awl, and thus form a loop. The work was supported on a box Z, sliding be- tween guides m, m, and moved by a screw n FIG. 1. Saint's Sewing Machine, 1790. turned by a toothed wheel o, which in turn was moved by an arm upon the shaft Te. One loop was carried over the other by the bent point of the spindle d in a manner similar to that which has been employed in some chain- stitch machines. The screw r adjusted the box I on the guide plate. In 1830 B. Thimo- nier patented a sewing machine in France, 80 of which, made of wood, were in use in 1841 for sewing army clothing at a shop in Paris. They were destroyed by a mob, as the Jac- quard loom and Hargreaves spinning jenny had been years before ; but during the revo- lution of 1848 Thimonier was again at work with other machines capable of making 200 stitches a minute. The mob again broke up his establishment, threatened his life, and de- feated his enterprise, and he died in poverty in 1857. Like that of Saint, his machine had a vertical needle descending from an over- hanging arm, the fabric being fed upon a hor- izontal table by hand.. The needle was driven