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Shoe-sewing machines

Shoe-sewing machines developed quickly out of early dry-thread machines. Barriers to applying the sewing machine to shoemaking were few. Dry-thread upper fitting was technically similar to cloth stitching. Still, a breaking-in problem existed. Looked at from the prospective of the economy as a whole, the sewing machine developed in a process that had momentum integral to the emerging sewing machine industry. But looked at within that industry, the sewing machine was formed through a number of relatively distinct processes. To develop machines for glove making, hat making and shoemaking, inventors faced technical problems learned through communication with producers in these industries and among the inventors and manufactures of special purpose sewing machinery. The more novel the machines and their uses, the more distinct were their paths of development. Two aspects of the commodity path taken by sewing machines were decisive for shoe machine invention. The first was learning by selling. John Nichols designed the first successful leather-stitching machine. Nichols went to Lynn to learn shoe cutting from his cousin, a shoe manufacturer. There he bought a Singer machine, reportedly one of the first 25 made. Finding that seams formed by this machine were too loose and the stitches too coarse, he attempted to develop a practical machine. He failed at first, succeeded in adapting the machine to sew pantaloons, and turned his attention back to shoe stitching. By designing a smaller needle and a new thread, he successfully stitched light upper leathers.

The second aspect was the diversification of firms. Noticing Nichols’s efforts, Singer employed him to develop its leather-sewing capabilities and then to teach operatives to use the machine. When shoe machinery had spread to many operations late in the century, Singer, still concentrating on dry-thread machines, sold more machines to shoe producers than any other company. Although by 1890 Singer sold more machines to shoe producers than any other company, dry-thread firms had little influence on wax-thread invention, which made up vast majority of leather-sewing patents. Heavier upper leathers had to be sewed with wax-thread, but this thread clogged the eye-point needle of dry-thread machines. In 1853 a Boston machinist, William Wickersham, solved the problem by introducing a chain stitch with a barbed or hooked needle. Following the leather-piercing awl, the needle penetrated the leather, a looper placed a loop of thread in the needle’s barb, and the needle ascended back through the leather. A hook then grasped the thread, the leather was fed forward, and the needle penetrated the material through the loop it had previously brought up. When the needle returned with a second loop, the stitch was completed. This machine not only allowed wax-thread to be sewed, it also was one of the first successful single-thread chain-stitching machines of any kind. The chain-stitch principle of the first known sewing machine, that of Thomas Saint, had finally been reapplied to the object of its invention, shoemaking.

Other shoe machines cannot be so easily accounted for. In contrast to the shoe-sewing machine, machines to peg, trim heels, and shape uppers, and to cut, trim and lay soles were not adaptations of machines outside shoemaking. Their operations were specific to shoemaking (with some extension to other leather trades) and sufficiently unique that prospective inventors found few solutions elsewhere in the economy.

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