Jewish Invention Myths: The Sewing Machine
Our next jewish invention myth is the sewing machines which jews like to try and attribute to the jew Isaac Singer.
As ‘MNews’ writes:
‘Isaac Merritt Singer – Sewing machine
As early as at the beginning of the past twentieth century, the name "Singer" (the surname of the inventor and the name of the manufacturing company he established) became synonymous with sewing machines. The famous Indian philosopher and public figure Mahatma Gandhi even said about "Singer" that it’s "one of the few useful things ever invented."’ (1)
Clearly jews are presenting Singer as the inventor of the sewing machine and certainly the modern sewing machine, but this is simply wrong.
What is the truth?
The first mechanical sewing machine was invented by the Prussian inventor Charles Fredrick Wiesenthal while he was living in England in 1755 and successfully patented as British Patent No. 701, (2) while an English cabinetmaker living in London named Thomas Saint invented a new mechanical sewing machine in 1790 successfully patenting it as British Patent No. 1764. (3)
Britons are quite prominent in the history of the invention of the sewing machine with another mechanical sewing machine created and patented by Englishman Thomas Stone in 1804 and a specialist sewing machine for embroidery being patented by Scottish inventor John Duncan in the same year. (4)
In 1818 Americans John Knowles and John Adams invented another version of the mechanical sewing machine but it was not a commercial success. (5)
However, by 1830 the modern mass-produced sewing machine had arrived and was a commercial success as the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ explains:
‘The first practical and widely used sewing machine was invented by Barthélemy Thimonnier, a French tailor, in 1829. His machine sewed straight seams using chain stitch like Saint's model, and in 1830, he signed a contract with Auguste Ferrand, a mining engineer, who made the requisite drawings and submitted a patent application. The patent for his machine was issued on 17 July 1830, and in the same year, he opened, with partners, the first machine-based clothing manufacturing company in the world to create army uniforms for the French Army.’ (6)
Clearly Isaac Singer didn’t invent the sewing machine, but what was his story?
Well, you see despite Singer being the massive commercial success in the form of Singer sewing machines there is rather less savoury story behind his ‘invention’ as Stephanie Lo writes:
‘The first machine to combine all the disparate elements of the previous half-century of innovation into the modern sewing machine was the device built by English inventor John Fisher in 1844, a little earlier than the very similar machines built by Isaac Merritt Singer in 1851, and the lesser known Elias Howe, in 1845. However, due to the botched filing of Fisher's patent at the Patent Office, he did not receive due recognition for the modern sewing machine in the legal disputations of priority with Singer, and Singer reaped the benefits of the patent.’ (7)
In essence then in 1851 Singer created a very similar sewing machine to John Fisher’s machine of 1844 and so similar was it that Fisher sued Singer but lost because of the British Patent Office making a major administrative error of some kind and Singer also notoriously also quite literally stole American inventor Elias Howe’s lockstitch sewing machine idea of 1845 after having seen it demonstrated in the United States.
Therefore, Singer didn’t create anything but the Singer Sewing Machine company and marketed and sold the similar inventions as though they were his own since to quote Lo again:
‘Howe and Singer’s designs were near enough identical to the one Fisher invented’. (8)
So, no Isaac Singer didn’t invent the sewing machine and he didn’t even invent his own product but rather stole the inventions of John Fisher and Elias Howe which he then passed off as his own.
References
(1) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions
(2) https://web.archive.org/web/20141220075439/http://indecohotels.com/sewingmachinebeginning.html
(3) Ibid.
(4) https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/who-invented-the-sewing-machine.html
(5) Ibid.
(6) https://www.britannica.com/technology/sewing-machine
(7) https://www.contrado.co.uk/blog/history-of-the-sewing-machine/
(8) Ibid.