SEWING MACHINE MAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 September 1940, Page 9

SEWING MACHINE MAN

DIES BROKEN-HEARTED & POOR. Poor Bathelmy Thimmonier! Born near Lyons in 1793, he was a tailor. Early in life he had one great ambition, to save poor women from toiling' all day and half the night stitching With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red. So he stitched all day to keep his wife and children alive, and spent all his night working on a sewing machine. At last he made it, and putting it on his back he carried it 400 miles to Paris, where no one would look at it, so there was nothing to do but go home again. On the -way home he met a man who undertook to help him to use his machine. He took out a patent, and soon he was superintending 80 workmen, all busy making military uniforms. But trouble was brewing. Tailors in the neighbourhood were alarmed. They saw their livelihood being filched from them, as they thought, quite wrongly, and they smashed Thimmonier’s machines. Then difficulties began again, but Thimmonier worked away, improving his machine till in 1845 it would make 200 stitches a minute. A lawyer helped him to manufacture sewing machines at 50 francs each, and in a few years he took out another patent, this time for a machine which made 300 stitches a minute, and twisted the cotton. Thimmonier was on the highroad to fame and fortune, but. suddenly trouble came to France. The persistent inventor visited England, and interested a firm so much that they promised to shew his sewing machine at the Great Exhibition of 1851. But misfortune was his. His machine reached the exhibition too late, and Elias Howe’s American machine was shown. Poor Thimmonier was broken-heart-ed. and from that lime on he fades out of the picture, dying in extreme poverty a few years after.