SINGER

Singer is an American Corporation best known as a producer of its sewing machines. Singer was set up in 1851 by Isaac Merritt Singer and his companion Edward Clark under the name of I.M.Singer & Co. In 1865 the company was given a new name of Singer Manufacturing Company, and in 1963 it became the Singer Company. It is located 30 km from Nashville in La Vergne, Tennessee.

By 1851 Isaac Merrit Singer, an unrecognized actor, an unknown inventor of machines for stone drilling and wood sawing, could hardly have imagined that years later his name would be branded all over the world.

Isaac Merritt Singer was born in October 27, 1811 in a small town of Troy, New York in a family of immigrants from Germany. At 12 he left school and went to Rochester, where he began working as an apprentice mechanic. When he was 20 he worked as a mechanic at a factory in Boston. There he created his first inventions - a saw frame and a woodworking machine. However, there was no commercial success, and the young Singer decided to become an actor, which also brought him no success. Then Singer started as a simple laborer on the construction of the Erie Canal. It was a hard job, especially manual chiseling of rocks. Singer got the idea to mechanize the process. He invented a new kind of drill and in 1839 patented his invention. The patent has brought him an unimaginable amount - $ 2,000. With the money he organized his own theater company, which disbanded after five years.

Singer decided not to tempt fate any longer. He went to work in a printing house, where he was captured by the idea to improve a typesetting machine. He has made a working model, but did not manage to sell it: there was an explosion in the workshop that destroyed his creation. Then Singer began working for a trader of sewing machines, which very often broke. During only 11 days Singer was puzzling over the way how to eliminate the cause of sewing machines’ failure, only 11 days, which “shocked the world” and made him a wealthy and world-known inventor.

Singer arranged a shuttle horizontally, and thread was no longer entangled itself. He proposed a cloth table and a foot-holder for a needle, so it was possible to make a continuous seam. He made a foot pedal to drive a machine and that afforded to work with a cloth with both hands. These three innovations have become the basic principles for a sewing machine for many years. All of the inventions have been protected by a huge package of patents, amounting to thousands of security documents.

The first Singer sewing machine was sold for one hundred dollars. That was perhaps for the first time in history when the first sample of the product, not only justified the expenses for preliminary designing, but also brought a profit.

Singer has proved to be a very sensible marketer for those times. He began to sell his machines on the installment system. After a few years of such trade by 1863 sales have increased to 20 thousand per year. By that time several specially constructed plants have been producing Singer sewing machines. In 1867 the company opened its first plant in Glasgow, Scotland. Probably just for that Singer should be considered the oldest multinational company.

When Isaac Merritt Singer, a rich and respected member of the American society, died at the age of 64, his company was selling more than 200 thousand machines a year.

The Singer Company has always been characterized by its striving to create and launch practical innovations assisting people to express themselves through the art of sewing.