Elias Howe And The Sewing Machine

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Recommended: Gutenberg invented the printing press

Nowadays, the words “innovation” and “creativity” get thrown around a lot in the business and academic worlds. But the road to making successful innovations isn’t always what people think. Often people make inventions to deal with a problem that they face. These inventions, in turn, spawn other inventions and innovation. It is these types of inventions that have the most impact on society have arisen from this. Here are three to remind you.

The Sewing Machine

Although Elias Howe is credited with the invention of the sewing machine, he actually wasn’t the first inventor of it. According to the Cambridge History website, as many as four patents for sewing machine prototypes existed before he invented the machine that would cause a gigantic …show more content…

He himself suffered from a type of disability that made his life as a physical laborer very challenging. In fact, at one time, this disability forced him to abandon the workforce. To pick up the financial slack, his wife took on odd sewing jobs to help the family make ends meet.

In this respect, Howe’s challenges with finances as well as his physical challenges played a role in motivating him to create a sewing machine. Initially, he was interested in making a machine that could knit. Howe was persuaded to build the sewing machine instead: He was told that he'd make more money from the invention of the sewing machine.

It took him a couple of years to figure out how a sewing machine works or should work, however. Initially, he was only able to sew the seams on clothes with his machine. Eventually, he created the machine that earned him patent number #4750 and allowed him to sew pretty much everything.

The Mill Museum website suggests that the invention of the sewing machine helped women prove that they could operate complex machinery. It also revolutionized the sewing trade and it became the symbol of women working in the industrial world.

The Gutenberg Printing …show more content…

More than half a millennium before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, the Chinese used block prints to print out their works. In fact, one of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts, “The Diamond Sutra,” was printed using this method.

In some respects, the Gutenberg press built on what the Chinese had already learned about the printing press. Often, the innovations arise out of the work or ideas of others. And certainly, the hatching and development of ideas, lots of ideas, are some of the most important first steps the inventor can take, according to the InnovationManagement.se website. More specifically, the person inventing something must be willing to have a lot of ideas, even a few bad ones, in order to invent something worth having.

So it was with the printing press. This machine, which revolutionized the dissemination of information and of books in mass quantities, was the product of many ideas that had been adapted and improved upon. For example, a modified wine press gave Gutenberg the screws he needed for part machine. Linseed oil and soot became

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