Sewing machine

A humble tailor from Saint-Étienne, France, invented the sewing machine but it was greeted with great hostility. Soon after it had been patented on 17 July 1830 a workshop was opened in Paris with 80 machines to sew military uniforms. A small, angry crowd of tailors working from home attacked the workshop, seeing it as a threat to their livelihoods. The inventor was beaten and chased away but rather than giving up he went on to improve his creation. Between 1830 and 1845, the sewing machine conquered the Western world. In France, England, and America alone, roughly thirty patents were issued for a variety of innovations: over the course of a century these became about a hundred. Although it was a European invention, the sewing machine became most widespread in America. In Philadelphia in 1856, Isaac M. Singer built the first pedal sewing machine and, 30 years later, the first electric one. At the end of the twentieth century, Italy was producing about 200,000 machines per year. The Necchi brand is the most famous.