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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
Sewing machine. History of invention and production
Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us A sewing machine is a technical device for joining and finishing materials by sewing. Sewing machines are used in the sewing, knitwear, footwear and other light industries, as well as in everyday life.
In Gorky's "Childhood", little Alyosha Peshkov, who was brought up by his grandfather and rarely saw his mother, remembered her by her dress with a number of small buttons from the collar to the edge of the hem. Such fashionable dresses at the end of the XNUMXth century could not become mass without the improvement of sewing machines. Sewing on buttons by hand is a thankless task, and fashion forced engineers to urgently start creating mechanisms for sewing on buttons with two and four holes and with an eye. Machines have even learned to wrap thread around the place of attaching a button with an eye. To prevent the loops from breaking, a bartacking machine was developed. And later, all these operations began to be performed on one machine. However, before hand-sewn fashion clothes could become mass-produced, a lot of time passed. Until the last quarter of the XNUMXth century, the influence of the sewing machine on fashion was small, but with the advent of specialized mechanisms, the situation changed. After that, it is difficult to say what influenced what, inventions on fashion or fashion requirements caused the creation of new machines. And yet this story begins much earlier - about 20 thousand years ago, when a man first used a stone or bone needle to connect the details of clothing and shoes. With the advent of metal, devices with a hook at the end for knitting and sewing came into use. Hand knitting hooks have changed little over the centuries, and the first sewing machine needle used the principle of crochet. In 1790, the Englishman Thomas Saint received a patent for a machine for sewing shoes with a hook needle, working on the principle of knitting with a chain. The machine did not receive distribution, since the seam was fragile and easily unraveled. The second attempt - by the Frenchman Bartholome Timonier - was also based on a hook needle. In a workshop organized in 1830 for sewing military uniforms, he had 80 wooden devices that beat off earnings from Parisian tailors. Angry, they destroyed the enterprise, and Timonier died in poverty. A revolution in machine sewing was made in 1846 by the American Elias Howe, who patented the combination in his machine of the principle of a shuttle known from the weaving craft with a new needle design. Howe toiled for a long time how to make a working needle, until one night he saw a nightmare: a tribe of savages with spears in their hands was chasing him, and when the cannibals almost caught up with him, the inventor saw that the shiny tips of the spears were drilled in the form of an eye of a sewing needle. Waking up in a cold sweat, Howe realized that a terrible dream told him the missing technical solution: it was necessary to move the eye from the top (like a "manual" sewing needle) down to the tip. In fairness, it should be noted that the German mechanic Charles Weisenthal became the real inventor of such a needle for hand sewing in 1755, and the American inventors William and Walter Chapman were the first to use it for sewing machines in 1807.
The speed of Howe's machine was ridiculously low by today's standards - 300 stitches per minute. However, this made an indelible impression. The inventor set up a competition for his offspring with five tailors, famous for the speed of hand sewing, and the machine beat them all. The fabric in that machine still had to be moved by hand, but the seam was exceptionally strong and even. Since then, lockstitch and chainstitch machines have been improved in parallel, and this was due to the specifics of the stitch and its capabilities. The chain stitch provides greater machine productivity and high stitch extensibility, which is especially important when sewing materials with a loose structure (knitwear, non-woven materials, etc.). The use of thread that is unwound from large bobbins (instead of a bobbin in a shuttle) contributes to much more rare stops for refueling, and sewing breakage is much less. And at the same time, the consumption of thread with a chain stitch is 1,35 times greater than with a shuttle stitch. The lockstitch does not open well and, therefore, is more reliable. With a sufficiently dense stitch, the thread leaves less than with a chain stitch. However, lockstitch machines are less productive, require frequent replacement of bobbins, and the shuttle itself wears out faster, because for every revolution of the main shaft there are two revolutions of the shuttle. The novelty of Elias Howe brought its creator a lot of ordeals. Having created a machine, he spent the next nine years trying to interest industrialists in its production, and then fought off imitators who used his invention. In America, no one supported his development, and he moved to England, the center for the production of textile machinery. In those years, all ladies' fashion was based on the use of corsets, and a local manufacturer instructed the inventor to create a machine for sewing these labor-intensive and expensive products. However, having received a working sample of the device, the owner refused to start production, and Howe went home, pawning a prototype machine and a patent to buy a ticket. What was his indignation when he learned that during his absence, several firms, having added their inventions to his fundamental principle of looping, had been earning for several years by producing sewing machines in the States. Howe's rights were violated, for example, by the world-famous Isaac Singer, who gave the world the reciprocating mechanism of the needle and was the first to use installment sales, and Allen Wilson, who developed a rotating shuttle with a catcher. Elias Howe belonged only to the principle of seam formation. The seam was formed from two threads with a straight needle with an eye on the tip and an open-type boat shuttle. The needle pierced the material being sewn, passing the upper thread under the needle plate, and rising, left a loop through which the shuttle passed from left to right, and passed the bobbin with the lower thread in it. Returning to the top, the needle with its thread pulled the bottom one. The cloth motor moved the material to form a stitch. With the next downward movement of the needle, a loop was again formed, which the shuttle, moving from right to left, bypassed, returning to the beginning of the cycle. Note that the fabric motor and many other components (thread guide, drive) were invented by Howe's patent infringing firms. The most important patents belonged to Wheeler & Wilson Mfg. Co.: on the four-stroke rack mechanism of the fabric engine, which is used to this day not only in the production of sewing machines, but also in other areas of technology, as well as on the hook catcher (catcher), later taken as the basis for the development of a round shuttle. The gripper in the Wheeler-Wilson machines worked differently than Howe's shuttle. Even the needle in their machine was not a straight one, but an arc one (later an arc needle was used for a blind seam when hemming the edge of a garment). And in the process of looping, one of the first rotary devices was used - the forerunner of a round shuttle device (more on that later). Common to the machines of Howe's infringing companies was the formation of a stitch. He sued and won. However, competitors, trying to avoid paying royalties, sought out a sewing machine created by a certain Walter Hunt long before Howe patented his. Howe's lawyer came to the rescue, explaining to all competitors that they were going to slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs. After all, if Howe's rights were questioned, they would all lose their right to exclusive production: anyone could make cars without paying a cent for using patents, car prices would fall, and everyone would lose from it. The violators not only paid a fine, but decided to unite in the SewingMachine Combination trust, distributing the markets among themselves. Singer got the then-seemingly unpromising segment of domestic cars, and Howe got the segment of sewing ship sails that looked like a golden residential segment. As history has shown, the appearance of the steam fleet destroyed the well-being of the creator of the lockstitch. But around the same time, close cooperation between the sewing machine and fashion began. On the wave of success, together with Edward Clark, Isaac Singer established in 1854 in New York the partnership "I.M. Singer and Co.". The system of sales by installments, unique for those times, allowed the company to win world fame and leadership by 1863. And already in the 60s of the 1863th century, the Singer Manufactory Company (official name since 1897) began to conquer the Russian market by founding the Singer Manufactory Company joint-stock company in XNUMX. His management quickly realized that importing finished cars from abroad was too wasteful a pleasure. Transportation costs made the cars more expensive and therefore more difficult to sell. And then it was decided to establish a new plant in the provincial Podolsk, a town with five thousand inhabitants. Since then, Singer cars have become even faster in Russia.
All the first sewing machines could only sew a straight seam connecting the pieces of clothing. But in order to follow the requirements of fashion, the inventors had to create various removable legs, with which it was possible to perform various technological operations on a conventional sewing machine: gather fabric into assemblies, sew up folds, hem the edge, sew on soutache (woven tape) or braid ... The paws made it possible to improve the quality of clothing and the productivity of the workshops where it was made. By the 1860s, users were no longer satisfied with the performance of the traditional reciprocating open-boat machine. Although the remaining actuating units - the thread guide, the fabric motor, the drive - had a sufficient margin to increase the speed, the friction forces arising from the movement of the shuttle mechanism were too large. In 1861, the American William Grover proposed a swinging shuttle device with a closed shuttle moving in an arc parallel to the seam line. Since the speed of such machines was higher (1500 rpm of the main shaft), the manufacturers urgently began to modernize production.
With the increase in the speed of sewing and with the advent of the Art Nouveau style in the last quarter of the XNUMXth century, entire factories for the manufacture of clothes began to appear. The era of excessive embellishment forced women to dress in bustles - puffy skirts on the back of the frame. The skirts of the dresses, with bustles hidden underneath, were decorated with trimmings of lace, velvet, flowers, and ruffled ribbons. There was an urgent need for special machines: seamstresses, for processing the edge, hemming the bottom of the dress, buttonholes, buttonholes, bartacks, etc. And again, high productivity was required. By this time, most opportunely, Wheeler & Wilson showed at the World Exhibition of 1873 in Vienna a new machine in which they proposed a new principle of rotation of the main shaft. In addition, a device driven by a curved profile gear was used in it. Due to this, the shuttle shaft rotated unevenly and the mechanics of stitch formation differed from the principle of loop formation of previous machines. Constructors from The Singer Manufacturing Co. improved the machine with an annular shuttle by using a gripper. And then Wheeler & Wilson picked up the baton again, forcing the ring grapple to move in a closed curve. The version of this machine was a milestone in the transition from a straight-line shuttle to modern rotary hook sewing machines.
In machines with an oscillating central bobbin hook-capture, reaching a speed of 2200 rpm, the looping process was organized as follows. The needle pierces the material being processed, passes through it and conducts the upper thread with it, forming an overlap from it in the area of the hook. The hook-capture with its spout passes into the loop and, rotating, pulls it with it, expands and circles around the bobbin with the bottom thread. When the nose of the hook brings the loop to more than half of the bobbin, the hook stops and starts to move in the opposite direction, while the thread feeder rises and pulls the upper thread around the left half of the bobbin and tightens the stitch. The fabric motor pushes the material being processed back, thereby continuing to form a stitch. The invention of the zigzag with a mechanical cam carrier made it possible for the developers of new models to decorate clothing details with decorative elements and seams of various configurations. And the appearance of textile knitting machines, which produce round or straight knitted fabrics that fashionistas love, made the creators of sewing machines think. The cut edge of knitwear is easily unraveled, and in order to cope with new tasks, machines have appeared that perform several operations simultaneously: they sew parts, cut the edge evenly and immediately process it. The zigzag mechanism gave rise to a series of lockstitch and chainstitch sewing machines for working loops. Machines of the "overlock" type appeared with a complex looping mechanism. The type and quality of the seam on such machines is such that fashion designers use it for decorative trimming of the front side of clothing. The 5000th century gave the world of fashion such a variety of sewing machines that there are practically no technological operations left that they could not perform. Their speed reaches more than 24 rpm of the main shaft, and they work with one, two or more threads. There are machines that perform a combination stitch (lock and chain) with XNUMX threads. The emergence of new fabrics required special equipment. So, for example, the fashion for bologna clothes that appeared in the late 50s forced the creation of special machines for a non-stop seam (bologna is a slippery fabric, and a special mechanism does not allow the layers of fabric to wrinkle). And in the 70s, electronics invaded the world of sewing machines: the Japanese company Genome released the first model with an electronic program carrier.
Today, when it comes to fashion, we mean not fabulously expensive models, made in one copy and shown on the catwalks around the world. At the shows, a general direction is given, and on its basis models are developed for general consumption. This is where sewing machines of various classes and types come into play. Fashion is a capricious lady, and a frequent change of clothing style is possible only because there are modern sewing machines. Author: S.Apresov
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