Many an inventor before him had attempted to make sewing machines and some had just fallen short of success.

Thomas Saint, an Englishman, had patented one fifty years earlier; and about this very time a Frenchman named Thimmonier was working eighty sewing machines making army uniforms, when needle workers of Paris, fearing that the bread was to be taken from them, broke into his workroom and destroyed the machines.

Thimmonier tried again, but his machine never came into general use.

Several patents had been issued on sewing machines in the United States, but without any practical result.

An inventor named Walter Hunt had discovered the principle of the lock-stitch and had built a machine but had wearied of his work and abandoned his invention, just as success was in sight.