S ewing machines don’t seem like that big of a deal these days. Very few of us make or mend our own clothes; our society is too focused on convenience, consumerism, and disposability these days. Most sewing machines are probably consigned to a fate similar to the one I own — boxed up behind the Christmas decorations in the basement. It’s been there, unused, for a decade.

But the sewing machine was once cutting-edge technology — a transformative invention in its time. It first altered the industrial world and then became ubiquitous in middle-class homes. Even the earliest, most primitive sewing machine could do its work seven times faster than someone working by hand; later models could work 20–30 times faster and with more standardized results.

Sewing machines helped to create the modern clothing industry. People now could buy ready-made clothes right off the rack, and they were able to afford enough clothing to vary their wardrobe more frequently. Millions of women were employed as seamstresses in the new industry.

The sewing machine also saved women an immense amount of domestic labor — all of theit patching and mending became much easier to do. How significant was it? Well, here’s a New York Times article from 1860 to tell us what this meant for women:

To America belongs the honor of giving to the world many new inventions of great practical importance to mankind. Prominent among these are the Electric Telegraph, the Reaper and Mower, and the Sewing-Machine. What the telegraph is to the commercial world, the reaper to the agricultural, the sewing-machine is to the domestic…

No one invention has brought with it so great a relief for our mothers and daughters as these iron needle-women. Indeed, it is the only invention that can be claimed chiefly for woman’s benefit. The inventive genius of man, ever alert to furnish the world with machinery for saving labor and cheapening the cost of manufactures, seemed to regard man as the only laborer, prior to the invention of the sewing machine. The carpenter, with his planing, matching, and other machinery, was relieved from the drudgery of his trade, but, on returning home at night, found no labor-saving machinery to relieve, his wife in her toil with the needle. The farmer, with his reaper, and threshing machine, gathers his harvest and prepares his grain for market with ten times the rapidity and ease that he could before these were invented; but his companion and helpmeet found no machinery to speed her labor and ease her toil, until the advent of the sewing-machine.

Sewing machines were big business, too. The name on that box somewhere in my basement was the one that became synonymous with the sewing machine business — SINGER. Isaac Merritt Singer (not to be confused with the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer) rose from obscurity to become one of the nineteenth century’s biggest business titans. The Singer Building in New York, completed in 1908, was briefly the tallest in the world.

What was the founder of this business empire like? He was about the last person you’d expect to become a tycoon — a deeply flawed human whose messy personal life somehow didn’t prevent him from ruthlessly conquering the business world.

Isaac Singer was born in upstate New York in 1811 to a troubled family. His parents divorced when he was twelve years old and, soon after, he ran away to Rochester, where he joined a traveling troupe of actors and did odd jobs from time to time. He seemed to aspire to be an actor, moving between different theater companies and traveling around the region putting on plays.

But this broke, itinerant actor also had a talent for machines. He used the money from his first invention, a new type of drill, to start up his own theater company — the Merritt Players — but he soon found that machines, not acting, would be his ticket to the big time. By the late 1840s, Singer had dedicated himself to selling a wood-carving machine that he had invented, but it didn’t go very far.

Many famed “innovators” like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk didn’t quite invent the technologies they are associated with. Instead, they identified useful ideas, tweaked them to make them more practical, and marketed the hell out of them. Isaac Singer fit that mold.

Sewing machines existed for years before he even got into the business. Inventors like John Fisher and Elias Howe had already developed most of the components of the sewing machine by the time Singer got into the business in the 1850s, but they weren’t as ruthless or savvy. One day, while working on his wood-cutting invention, Singer came across Howe’s machine in a Boston factory. He identified a few ways that it could be tweaked (Howe’s machine required cloth to be fed through vertically, not horizontally, and had a few other differences from the sewing machines you and I are familiar with).

Singer’s variations on Howe’s design made the sewing machine more practical, and his marketing schemes made it attractive. Singer pioneered several business techniques that would make him rich. First, he allowed people to pay him in installments for these expensive machines. This was the first major use of consumer credit, allowing people to afford the big purchase — $125 — by paying little bits over time. He worked hard to make a cheaper version of the machine, as well, eventually getting the price down to a more affordable $10.

Second, Singer marketed directly to women, and he did so with flair. He held theatrical, entertaining demonstrations of his product, allowing people to see women operating the Singer machine. This was controversial because most advertising was targeted at the man of the house. Even letting women do public demonstrations was edgy — as late as 1867, the British Medical Journal was publishing articles that accused the rhythmic, physical tasks associated with sewing machines of causing “erethism” — basically, inappropriate sexual excitement. Singer didn’t care about this — he used his theater training to recite the poem “Song of the Shirt,” which promised women liberation from drudgery:

With fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread —

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch, —

Would that its tone could reach the Rich! —

She sang this “Song of the Shirt!”

Lest we get ahead of ourselves and think that Singer was some sort of proto-feminist, he also said this when he was considering getting into the sewing machine business: “What a devilish machine! You want to do away with the only thing that keeps women quiet, their sewing!” Rather than being a warrior for equality, he was a straight-up misogynist, as we’ll explore more in a bit.

But first, we should look at how Isaac Singer laid waste to his business rivals. As I mentioned, John Fisher and Elias Howe had both developed machines that were strikingly similar to the one Singer eventually marketed; neither would get as rich as Singer did. Fisher was first to market, developing his machine in 1844. But he somehow messed up his filing at the patent office and found himself with no legal recourse when his designs were selling like hotcakes under Singer’s name later on.

Howe had designed the actual machine that Singer saw in Boston and then tweaked to start his business. He spent much of 1850 in England trying to find buyers for his invention. The trip was a failure, and when he came back, broke, to the United States, he was startled to see shop windows with a machine very similar to his own bearing the name “Singer.”

Thus began the “Sewing Machine War,” as Howe tried to compete with Singer, while suing him and working to get the press to criticize him. Howe soon realized that his path to riches lay in the courts rather than the marketplace. After years of grueling litigation, he won; after this, Singer had to pay Howe for each sewing machine he sold. Howe’s lawsuit was just the beginning — it set off a cascading series of lawsuits between a number of sewing machine companies. The chaos ended only when the four major competitors in the market agreed to form a cartel — the “Sewing Machine Combination” — and share the patents, paying Howe a royalty on each machine sold.

The lawsuits didn’t really hurt Singer that much. He made so much money in the sewing machine business that, when he died, he was able to set his children up for life — even though there were 20 of them still living (he had 24 kids in all). How did he end up with 24 kids? Well, it turns out that the great liberator of middle-class women had a decidedly shady romantic life.

Singer first married in 1830 when he was nineteen, long before he came across Elias Howe’s sewing machine. His bride, Catherine Haley, was only 15. They were technically married for three decades, although for most of that time they didn’t live together. You see, after they had two children, Singer left to join a traveling theater company — the Baltimore Strolling Players.

Even as a teenage actor and new husband, Singer was widely known as a ladies’ man. A newspaper said, “his intimacy with the female part of the population was severely commented upon, and much sympathy was expressed for his wife.”

In 1836, just before the birth of his second child with Catherine, Singer took up with another woman, Mary Ann Sponsler (an actress in his Merritt Players). Though they never technically married, he and Mary Ann lived as husband and wife — he introduced her as such — and had 10 children together, all while Singer was still married to Catherine.

In a particularly cheeky move, Singer eventually divorced Catherine in 1860, having left her over twenty years before for another woman. The reason? She was cheating on him. Though Singer was quite generous with all of his children in his will, he did leave one of them out — his first son William, who stuck up for Catherine in their divorce case. He received only $500 when his dad passed away.

Soon after Singer’s divorce from Catherine, he had another scandalous romantic entanglement. By 1860 his business was skyrocketing; he now lived in luxury in New York City. And one day, Mary Ann saw Singer riding down Fifth Avenue with another woman. This was Mary McGonigal, who by this point had given birth to five of Singer’s children (they would eventually have seven kids together; Singer was also reportedly sleeping with Mary’s sister Kate at the time). Soon after, it became clear that Singer had yet another “wife” — a former sewing machine demonstration model — with another child elsewhere in the city.

Once she discovered Singer’s second (third? fourth?) family, Mary Ann had her husband arrested for bigamy. He fled the country in disgrace, setting up in London for a while. There, the fifty-year-old magnate took up with the 19-year-old Isabella Boyer, who left her husband while pregnant with Singer’s child and married him. She was reportedly the model for the Statue of Liberty. They had six kids together.

Singer finally settled in Paris and London; he never returned to the United States, partially because his romantic exploits had made him a disgrace in New York high society. He stepped back from day-to-day control of his company in the 1860s but continued to make money as a stockholder. His scandalous life didn’t seem to hurt him or his children in Europe; several of his children married European royalty. His children inherited $14,000,000 when he died.

Isaac Singer seems to have been an absolute mess of a human being. A brilliant mechanic, a talented showman, and a skilled marketer, he bullied his way to the top of American business, using ideas that weren’t quite his own. Though he created a device that transformed many women's lives for the better, he seems to have made the lives of most of the women in his life worse.

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