CHAPTER VI.
THE REASON WHY.
There is a valid reason for everything in this world, whether we are able to find it or not, and for all this wonderful growth and Aladdin-like success there is a reason too. In 1872, when the great Chicago fire had impoverished thousands of the residents of that city, the Relief Committee undertook to furnish sewing machines to all the needy sewing-girls who might apply. Each girl was permitted to choose her machine from among the sixteen different kinds kept by the Committee. The total number of women who took machines was 2,944, and of this number 2,427 chose Singer machines, and the other 517 women distributed their choice among the fifteen other kinds of machines. These poor women expected to earn their living on these machines, and there must have been some reason why such an overwhelming majority of them took “Singers” instead of machines of other make, each of which was loudly proclaimed by its manufacturers to be the “best in the world.”
The Singer Machines have been awarded the first premium over all others more than two hundred times, at great World’s Fairs, at State Fairs, and at County Fairs in every part of the United States.
As we have before stated, three-quarters of all the sewing machines sold throughout the world in 1879 were “Singers,” and there must be a reason for that. When any one style of machine, used in millions of homes, leads all the other kinds to such an extent as that, there must be some way of accounting for it all, and if our readers choose to read on they will shortly discover why.
An interesting fact in this connection was related to the writer recently by Mr. Galland, a large manufacturer of ladies’ garments, whose factories are located at Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Gallands use several hundred sewing machines in their factories, operating them by steam. They had machines of many different makers originally, but gradually, as these machines wore out, had been replacing them with “Singers.” The reason assigned was that they had noticed, from time to time, that when a Singer machine became vacant, the girls who worked on machines of other kinds were clamorous to obtain the Singer and leave their own; and, when machines of other make were vacant, the girls were full of excuses for not taking them, but seemed desirous of waiting for the next vacancy, in hope of getting a “Singer.” These observations led to inquiry from their master mechanic, who explained that the girls working on “Singers” lost less time in repairing, and in those peculiar sewing machine “fits,” than the girls who operated other machines. At this point the pay rolls were consulted by the inquiring proprietors, and there the whole secret lay exposed to view; for the work was paid for by the piece, and the rolls showed that the girls operating Singer machines were earning from one dollar to two-and-a-half dollars a week more than the other operators!
[Illustration:
TESTING THE MACHINES. ]
Here then is the open secret of the Singer Machine’s favor with the people. It is so simple that a child can understand it; it is so strong that a bungler can hardly get it out of order, and every part (as we have seen) is made with such scrupulous exactness out of the best materials, fitted in its place to the _thousandth part of an inch_, and tested and re-tested so many times before it is permitted to leave the factory, that it does not get the “fits” which try a woman’s patience, destroy the fruits of her labor, and consume her time in vexing attempts to coax the machine back to duty. A gentleman wrote to the Company quite recently that he had a Singer Machine bought twenty-three years ago, and in use all that time, which sews perfectly to-day.
Many people sit bewildered by the immensity of the Sewing Machine trade, and wonder what becomes of all the machines. The answer is very simple. If the trade is large, the world is larger still. Carefully prepared statistics show that the entire world contains at the present time not over six million sewing machines, good, bad, and indifferent. The United States alone contain nearly ten million families. But fully one million machines are not in homes but in factories, operated by steam, driven at the highest possible speed, and consequently wearing out in a few years. Therefore, if all the machines in the world were brought here they would supply only half the families of our own land. The civilized countries of the globe, where sewing machines are now being introduced, have over seventy million families, not including China, Japan and India, where a trade is being rapidly developed. In a word, the sewing machine is now being offered to a population of not far from a hundred million families, and the world contains not more than six per cent. of the number of machines necessary to supply them, without considering the enormous consumption of machines in shops and factories.
It is plain, from these figures, that great as the trade has grown from the small beginning, it is yet in its infancy. Nevertheless, it has proved, except in a few instances, one of the most hazardous of enterprises. Probably as much money has been lost in the sewing machine business as has been made. The introduction of steam into manufactures and commerce has wrought changes so marked and rapid that none but keen and careful students of their own times could keep track of them, and thousands of good men have gone down because they had not considered the new elements introduced, particularly into manufacturing industries, by steam and improved machinery. These have brought in a subdivision of labor which our forefathers scarcely dreamed about, and which we have seen in our trip through the factory. It is almost incredible what speed a mechanic acquires whose task consists in performing one single brief operation, and repeating it over and over a hundred times an hour for months and years. We watched, with wondering interest, a man varnishing the under surface of the machine bed-plate. The space to be varnished was about a square foot in area, filled with obstructions and angles, every one of which must be touched with his brush. The operation was reduced to an exact science. His left hand caught the machine arm in just such a place every time; his brush went into the pot in just such a way; just so many sweeps it gave this way, exactly so many that way, and with precisely such a toss every time it was spun across the table to his assistant. Spring and summer, fall and winter, that man did nothing but wipe that brush just so many times across that square foot of iron, and he did it with a precision and rapidity that was marvelous. The quickest painter we ever saw could not do one machine while he would finish five.
[Illustration:
PUNCHING THE NEEDLE EYE. ]
And this is but a type of several hundred different operations into which labor is subdivided here, and which, by such subdivision, is so cheapened that employers whose capital and business will warrant it, can pay labor a good price and yet drive out competitors who are without large capital, large business and skill to use the advantages which are thus available. On this rock many sewing machine manufacturers have split without, perhaps, knowing that it was only the lack of a large demand for their machines, and the absence of a large and well-directed capital which wrecked them. In the last few years over fifty sewing machine companies have failed, and swamped large nominal capital in the aggregate.
The lesson is almost too obvious to justify the formulating of a prophecy that the sewing machine business of the future is likely to concentrate in a comparatively few corporations, whose skill, capital and facilities will be sufficient to bring out the best machines, made of the best materials; paying their skilled operatives liberal wages, and yet enabled, by this subdivision of labor, to offer them to the people at a price within the reach of all.
Such is the story of the Sewing Machine from its paltry and inauspicious beginning. Such were the struggles and trials of the man to whose genius the world owes the vast, incalculable, and forever accumulating benefits of this great invention. And when we try to conceive what the world would be to-day if the Sewing Machine and all its concomitant blessings were suddenly removed from among its inhabitants, we look at this record of his achievements and rich triumphs, and rejoice that the common experience of inventors was not realized in the Sewing Machine invention, but that in this instance, at least, a great mechanician lived to see his
──┤Genius Rewarded├──
[Illustration:
SINGER’S ORIGINAL MACHINE. ]
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