[14] John P. Stambaugh, A History of the Sewing Machine(Hartford, Conn., 1872), p. 13; Sewing Machine News (July 1880), vol. 1, no. 12, p. 4.

[15] “Sewing Machines,” Johnson’s Universal Cyclopaedia (New York, 1878), vol. 4, p. 205. The 1874 edition does not include this reference to Rev. John Adam Dodge.

[16] Letters to the author from the Vermont Historical Society (Nov. 13, 1953) and the Bennington Historical Museum and Art Gallery (May 2, 1953).

[17] Edmund Burke. Commissioner of Patents, List of Patents for Inventions and Designs Issued by the United States from 1790 to 1847 (Washington, 1847).

[18] See Barthelemy Thimonnier’s biographical sketch, p. 137.

[19] French patent issued to Barthelemy Thimonnier and M. Ferrand (who was a tutor at l’Ecole des Mines, Saint-Etienne, and helped finance the patent), July 17, 1830.

[20] The company was located at Villefranche-sur-Saône, but no name is recorded. See J. Granger, Thimonnier et la machine à coudre(1943), p. 16.

[21] See Walter Hunt’s biographical sketch, p. 138.

[22] The earliest known reference in print to Walter Hunt’s sewing machine is in Sewing by Machinery: An Exposition of the History of Patentees of Various Sewing Machines and of the Rights of the Public(I. M. Singer & Co., 1853). A more detailed story of Hunt’s invention is in Sewing Machine News (1880-81), vol. 2, no. 2, p. 4; no. 4, p. 5; and no. 8, pp. 3 and 8.

[23] Vol. 2, no. 8, p. 3.

[24] In the opinion and decision of C. Mason, Commissioner of the Patent Office, offered on May 24, 1854, for the Hunt vs. Howe interference suit, Mason stated: “He [Hunt] proves that in 1834 or 1835 he contrived a machine by which he actually effected his purpose of sewing cloth with considerable success.”

[25] The rebuilt machine, according to a letter to the author from B. F. Thompson of the Singer company, is believed to have been one of the machines lost in a Singer factory fire at Elizabethport, N.J., in 1890.

[26] Op. cit. (footnote 24).

[27] Edward H. Knight, Sewing Machines, vol. 3 of Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary.

[28] A seam using the saddler’s stitch appears as a neat line of touching stitches on both sides. Even when made by hand, it is sometimes misidentified by the casual observer as the lockstitch because of the uniformity of both sides. If the saddler’s stitch was formed of threads of two different colors, the even stitches on one side of the seam and the odd stitches on the reverse side would be of one color, and vice versa.

[29] The Life and Works of George H. Corliss, privately printed for Mary Corliss by the American Historical Society, 1930. The Corliss family records were turned over to the Baker Library, Harvard University. In a letter addressed to this author by Robert W. Lovett of the Manuscripts Division on August 2, 1954, it was reported that there was a record on their Corliss card to the effect that a model of his sewing machine, received with the collection, was turned over to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; however, Mr. Lovett also stated that from a manuscript memoir of Mr. Corliss that it would seem that he developed only the one machine—the patent model. In a letter dated November 15, 1954, Stanley Backer, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, stated that after extensive inquiries they were unable to locate the model at M.I.T. In 1964, Dr. Robert Woodbury, of M.I.T., turned over to the Smithsonian Institution the official copies of the Corliss drawings and the specifications which had been awarded to the inventor by the Patent Office. It is possible that this may have been the material noted on the Harvard University card as having been transferred to M.I.T.