Issac Merrit Singer is granted a patent…

Issac Merrit Singer is granted a patent for his sewing machine on August 12, 1851.

Singer had obtained his first patent, for a machine to drill rock, in 1839, selling it for two thousand dollars to the Illinois and Michigan Canal Building Company.

With this financial success, he had opted to return to his career as an actor, going on tour, forming a troupe known as the "Merritt Players", and appearing onstage under the name "Isaac Merritt".

The tour lasted about five years.

He had developed and patented a "machine for carving wood and metal" on April 10, 1849.

At thirty-eight, with his lover Mary Ann Sponsler and eight children, he had packed up his family and moved back to New York City, hoping to market his woodblock cutting machine there.

He had obtained an advance to build a working prototype, and constructed one in the shop of A.

B. Taylor & Co., where ere he had met G. B. Zieber, who became Singer's financier and partner.

However, not long after the machine was built, the steam boiler had blown up at the shop, destroying the prototype.

Zieber had persuaded Singer to make a new start in Boston, a center of the printing trade.

Singer had gone to Boston in 1850 to display his invention at the machine shop of Orson C. Phelps.

Orders for Singer's wood cutting machine were not, however, forthcoming.

Lerow & Blodgett sewing machines were being constructed and repaired in Phelps' shop.

Phelps had asked Singer to look at the sewing machines, which were difficult to use and produce.

Singer had concluded that the sewing machine would be more reliable if the shuttle moved in a straight line rather than a circle, with a straight rather than a curved needle.

Singer was able to obtain US Patent number 8294 for his improvements on August 12, 1851.

He founds, with New York lawyer Edward Clark, I.M. Singer & Co. Singer's prototype sewing machine becomes the first to work in a practical way.

It can sew nine hundred stitches per minute, far better than the forty of an accomplished seamstress on simple work.