Isaac Singer

Isaac Singer

One of those mechanics was Isaac Singer. Born in 1811 in Pittstown, NY, Singer was (like Hunt and Howe) a mechanic, although with even less training. (He was also an actor, but not a good one.) Singer was also aggressive, loud mouthed, a bully, a serial liar, and completely self-absorbed – in short, he was a sociopath. During his lifetime Singer had several wives and mistresses (and most of his marriages were illegal, as he neglected to get divorces from his earlier wives), and fathered at least 24 children.Singer left home early. Finding his way to Ohio, he worked for a while with a company that was building a canal. He invented and patented a rock drill, and sold the rights to his employer for $2,000 ($46,000 in today’s money). He then blew it all creating an acting troupe, with himself as the lead actor. While doing this, he abandoned his first wife and took up with his second.The acting troupe failed. At age 38, Singer moved with his second wife and their eight children to New York, where he rented a shop and set to work trying to invent a wood-block cutting machine for use in printing. When the boiler blew up and demolished the building, he slipped out of town and went to Boston, to try his luck there. It was in Boston that Singer heard about attempts to invent a sewing machine.Singer repeatedly formed relationships with men and women whom he could bully. In Boston, he teamed up with a well meaning but weak-willed mechanic, Orson Phelps, who owned his own shop. He bullied Phelps into doing much of the work. (Below: Isaac Singer’s patent model for a sewing machine, 1851. Public domain. Smithsonian Institution.)

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