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Alex I Askaroff Alex has spent a lifetime in the sewing industry and is considered one of the foremost experts of pioneering machines and their inventors. He has written extensively for trade magazines, radio, television, books and publications world wide. Over the last two decades Alex has been painstakingly building this website to encourage enthusiasts around around the Globe.
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By far the most famous name in the history of the sewing machine in France is Barthelemy Thimonnier. Barthelemy Thimonnier is possibly responsible for the first real sewing machine in the history of the world. Calm down, calm down. I only said possibly. you will have to read my full history of the invention of the sewing machine to see how Barthelemy Thimonnier fits into the whole picture. Let us just look at the first French sewing machine and Barthélemy Thimonnier. His Story Barthelemy Thimonnier 1793 - 1857 Barthélemy Thimonnier was born on August 19, 1793 in L'Arbresle, Rhône.Barthélemy Thimonnier was the oldest son of seven children. He studied for a while in Lyon, before going to work as a tailor in Paris. In 1823, he settled just outside Saint-Étienne and went to work as a tailor. Tailors worked hard and were paid poorly. As Barthélemy Thimonnier sewed away each day his inventive mind was hard at work trying to figure out how to make a machine do the low-paid work of the tailor. After years of trial-and-error he formed a machine out of wood that actually did help him to stitch fabric. By 1829, he had invented the first French sewing machine and signed a contract with Auguste Ferrand. The patent for his machine was issued on 17 July 1830. The first real sewing machine that we know of was born. Barthélemy Thimonnier (I'm going to call him Bart now as it makes my head hurt spelling his name) took out a patent for a barbed needled to be used in his sewing machine. Barbed needles are still used today in embellishing sewing machines today.
Barthelemy Thimonnier's wooden sewing machine. The thread is below the table and was caught by the barbed needle and pulled through the work. The machines were nicknamed arm breakers and leg crackers as they were so hard to work. The sewing machine that Barthélemy Thimonnier made was of wood. It actually worked, producing a sort of chain stitch, or as he called it on his patent a tambour stitch, you know the sort of stitch you find across potato sacks. In fact the sewing machines worked so well that he gained a contract to build loads of them. They were used to sew uniforms for the French army. Before long Bart was sewing away with dozens of machines taking work from the hungry tailors of Paris. The first sewing machine factory in the world was doing well but we all know what Frenchmen are like when their blood is up. Madame Guillotine was still warm from their revolution. On the 20 January 1831 a crowd or angry out-of-work tailors ransacked the rue de Sèvres factory. At first they threw garlic at the machines but to their amazement they bounced off! They then decided to have a booze up and torch Bart’s workshop. A crowd watched as they piled all the wooden sewing machines up outside his workshop and burnt them. They danced around the fire singing Vive La France or something like that. Poor old Bart headed for the hills, his business in flames. Look, I can be as rude as I like about the French as I have a lot of French blood in me and not via a blood transfusion! Bart, unperturbed, and with that usual French resilience, started all over again with an even better model. More patents followed in 1841, 1845, and 1847. Capable of sewing 200 stitches per minute seven times faster than a tailor by hand! A later patent managed 300 stitches per minute. By 1832, Barthélemy Thimonnier was back in Amplepuis with an improved version of his machine. Nevertheless, those sneaky tailors knew what he was up to and set about the poor fellow again, this time with far more powerful weapons, strings of onions! Barthélemy Thimonnier fled to England just like the many aristocrats that had feared for their lives during the French Revolution years earlier. Where was the Scarlet Pimpernel when he was needed eh! It is unfortunate that the French, at that time, did not see the potential of the sewing machine for it made people like Isaac Singer and Elias Howe fabulously wealthy. It also saw the start of mass production and provided millions of jobs around the world. In October 1847 Barthélemy Thimonnier and Jean-Marie Magnin patented a type of embroidery sewing machine. A faster type of Tambour stitch machine. In England he tied up with Phillip May of London to secure his patent. Unfortunately Barthélemy Thimonnier stuck with his old ideas of hooking and pulling threads rather than improve his type of unreliable stitch. The stitch came undone easily and had to be sealed at each end with candle wax. Also it was easy for the machine to miss stitches and once a stitch was missed the whole seam could unravel. Basically the design was flawed unlike the Willcox & Gibbs chain stitch which had overcome all the problems associated with it. Barthélemy Thimonnier was still going strong with his flawed machine and in 1850 he applied for American patents in the hope of securing lucrative business in the largest democracy in the world. At the 1855 World Fair in Paris Barthélemy Thimonnier won the First class or Gold Medal. However I think this was a bit of French politics trying to show the world that it was a Frenchman, one Barthélemy Thimonnier who had actually invented the first sewing machine. The machine would not have been as good as the foreign competitors from America.
United
States Patent Office As much as he tried poor old Barthélemy Thimonnier never regained his former success and although he had made the first reasonable sewing machine in the entire history of the world it did not stop the old tailor ending up with very little. Just two years after his success at the Paris show he died. Barthélemy Thimonnier died on 5 July 1857 at the good age (for the time) of 64. One final note is that there is still a company called Thimonnier who sell bag closing equipment today. Barthélemy Thimonnier would have been very proud of the fact that his name will be immortalised for being one of the first people in the history of the world to invent a working, usable sewing machine.
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Well that's it, I do hope you enjoyed my work.
I have spent a lifetime collecting, researching and writing these pages and I love to hear from
people so drop me a line and let me know what you thought:
alexsussex@aol.com.
Also if you have any information to add I would love to put it on my
site.
Alex's latest Book: Tales from the Coast Fancy a funny read: Ena Wilf & The One-Armed Machinist A brilliant slice of 1940's life: Spies & Spitfires
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CONTACT: alexsussex@aol.com Copyright ©
As a
new collector I have found your site
has increased my knowledge in
a short time to a degree
that I couldn't have
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