On September 10, 1846, Elias Howe, a mechanic from Spencer, Massachusetts, was granted United States patent number 4,750 for a sewing machine. He was 27. The machine ran at about 250 stitches a minute, which no hand sewer could match, and the part that made it work was the stitch.
Earlier machines used a chain stitch, a single thread looped through itself. A chain stitch unravels. Pull the right thread and the whole seam comes out. Howe's machine used a lockstitch, with one thread on a curved, eye-pointed needle passed through the cloth and a second thread carried underneath on a shuttle, the two interlocking in the middle of the fabric. The seam does not pull apart and it does not unravel. That is the same stitch every domestic sewing machine still uses.
Howe had almost no luck selling it. American tailors saw it as a threat. The machine was expensive. He went to England in 1846, sold the English rights for about 1,250 dollars, built machines in London for a year, and came back nearly broke. While he was away other Americans had started building machines, and the one that sold was Isaac Singer's, with a foot treadle and a needle driven straight up and down rather than sideways.
Howe did not invent in isolation and the courts said so. Walter Hunt had built a lockstitch machine in New York in 1834 and abandoned it, and when the patent suits reached court in the early 1850s the judges had to decide whether Howe or Hunt had got there first. They found for Howe in 1854, on the evidence that Hunt had not completed a working machine or pursued it, and Howe then collected royalties from Singer, Wheeler and Wilson and the other makers. He is said to have earned around two million dollars from the patent.
The effect on the clothing trade was structural. Sewing by hand had been the bottleneck in making clothes, and once machines could do straight seams at speed, the constraint moved to cutting and to distribution. Ready-made clothing, and the sweatshop system that produced it, both grew out of that change.