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The Sewing Machine Needle

Why is the eye at the tip?

Before 1755

Eye at the back

Hand needles, first of bone and later of iron, always had the eye at the back. The needle passed all the way through the cloth and the thread followed. No machine could copy that move.

For centuries every garment was sewn by hand, one stitch at a time. A shirt held thousands of stitches, and a tailor could spend days on one.

A hand needle has its eye at the back. It passes all the way through the cloth and the thread follows. A machine has no hand on the other side to catch the needle, so the eye had to move to the tip. Getting that right took 112 years.

An idea from a dream

As the story goes, in 1845 Elias Howe dreamed of a king's guards whose spears had small holes right next to their points. He woke up knowing where the eye of his needle should go.

What really happened

Historians think the dream most likely never happened. Machine needles with the eye at the tip existed years before Howe. The real story has a smashed workshop, a hidden machine, a patent left in pawn and a long courtroom fight.

An idea from a dream

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Timeline

1755

A needle pointed at both ends

Engineer Charles Weisenthal patented a needle for use in a machine. It was pointed at both ends with the eye at one end. The machine itself was never built.²

London
1790

Drawings left on a shelf

Thomas Saint drew a machine for sewing leather and sailcloth, though there is no evidence he built it. The drawings sat in the patent office for 84 years. In 1874 someone built the machine from them and, with a small fix, it worked.²

England
1830

A hooked needle and a chain stitch

Tailor Barthélemy Thimonnier patented one of the first sewing machines that really worked. His needle had no eye, just a crochet-like hook that caught the thread under the cloth. The single-thread chain stitch came apart when pulled from the end.³

Paris
1831

The workshop is stormed

His eighty-machine workshop, sewing army uniforms, was stormed by 150–200 tailors afraid for their jobs, and the machines were smashed. Some sources say it was set on fire too. Thimonnier won awards but died poor.³

Paris
1830s

The hidden machine

Walter Hunt found the answer. He used an eye-pointed needle with a shuttle moving back and forth below it, so two threads locked together. The story goes that he feared it would put seamstresses out of work and shelved it without a patent.⁴

New York
1845–1846

The lockstitch and the great race

Backed by his friend George Fisher, Elias Howe finished his machine in spring 1845. In a race it made 250 stitches a minute and beat five tailors. The patent was granted on 10 September 1846.¹⁷

Boston
1846–1849

A patent in pawn

With no orders in America, Howe tried England, and things went wrong there too. The story goes that he pawned his last machine and his patent papers to pay for the trip home. He was almost penniless when he got back in 1849.¹⁸

London
1850–1851

Singer and eleven days

Isaac Singer looked at a broken machine and proposed a straight shuttle and a needle moving straight up and down. Sources say the new machine took eleven days and forty dollars. Singer sold it on instalments and brought it into homes.⁵¹⁰

Boston
1854

The court rules

Howe sued for his patent rights. The defence brought up Walter Hunt's old machine, but the case ended in Howe's favour. From then on he earned a fee on almost every machine sold.¹

USA
1856

The first patent pool

The rivals stopped fighting and pooled their patents in the Sewing Machine Combination, America's first patent pool. Every other maker paid a fee per machine.⁶

USA
1867

A gold medal

Howe's machine won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition, in the city where tailors had smashed machines. The same year he received the Légion d'honneur, and he died aged 48.¹

Paris

How does a lockstitch work?

The needle goes down

The eye-pointed needle carries the thread down through the cloth and leaves a small loop underneath.
The shuttle passes

The shuttle waiting below the cloth passes a second thread through that loop.
The threads lock

The two threads lock together in the middle of the cloth. Unlike a chain stitch, it does not unravel when pulled.

So who invented it?

Charles Weisenthal: First patent for an eye-pointed machine needle (1755)
Barthélemy Thimonnier: One of the first machines that really worked (1830)
Walter Hunt: Eye-pointed needle and shuttle, never patented (1830s)
Elias Howe: The lockstitch patent, defended in court (1846–1854)
Isaac Singer: A practical machine sold on instalments (1851)

The patent went to Howe and Singer put the machine in people's homes. Hunt had shelved the same idea years earlier.

Did you know?

Years later Walter Hunt bent a piece of wire into the safety pin and sold the patent for just 400 dollars.
Howe used part of his fortune to equip a Civil War regiment and then joined it as a private.
Howe also patented a device for closing garments in 1851. He never sold it, and the idea later became the zipper.

Sources

Stories we could not verify start with "as the story goes".

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