Another exhibit in the recent V and A 'undressed exhibition' that intrigued me was a thermal petticoat dated 1860. It was part of the V and A collection and is usually in Room 122, case 2 if you are interested and also part of the V and A online collection.
(Photo copyright of V and A museum)
The outer layer is of printed cotton ( which looked very much like a Norwich Shawl ) 1 , it was lined with cotton and Arctic goose down filled the space between the two. It was made by Booth and Fox who are noted as being in Britain, London and Ireland, Cork.
From looking closely the stitches were very regular and obviously machine done.
This then led me to ask - how common was the sewing machine in 1860?
So I tried to find out more about the invention of the sewing machine. It is a fascinating story of a lot of people having a go and tweaking things or you could say altering details on the previous patents.
The first patent appears to have been filed by Thomas Saint in 1790 - that surprised me! It used one thread and formed a chain. A string of people including Walter Hunt who used a double thread (1834) and Elias Howe also in 1834 improved things and then in 1851 M. Singer and E Clark set up Singer. The sewing machine which looked much like it does today was manufactured, initially as a treddle and for a century Singer machines rather dominated the world.
I don't actually know the answer to my question - I would think the answer is 'few' but
by 1900 20 million are said to have been used worldwide.
My oldest sewing machine and dates to 1898. I just love the decoration.
It stitches well. ( more about it at blogpost of 13 Feb 2012)
The other interesting thing is that the dye used for the Red is Turkey Red which is a variation of the red obtained from Madder..... but that is another story !
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