In Europe and Asia labor was plentiful, and the reaper had to win its way more slowly. McCormick showed his machine at the great international exhibitions and gradually induced the large landowners to consider it. Practical demonstration proved its value, and it made its appearance in the fields of European Russia and Siberia, in Germany and France and the Slavic countries, in India, Australia, and the Argentine, and at last wherever wheat was to be cut. It trebled the output of grain, and the welfare of the people has proven largely dependent on their food supply. It has been an invention of the greatest economic value to the world. XII HOWE AND THE SEWING-MACHINE 1819-1867 The needs of his times, and of the people among whom he lives, have often set the inventor’s mind working along the line of his achievement. It was so with Elias Howe, who built the first sewing-machine. A hard-working man, and not overstrong, he would return to his home from the machine-shop where he was employed, and throw himself on the bed night after night to rest. Each night he watched his young wife sewing to clothe their three children and add a little something to the family income. With a strong taste for mechanics it was natural that he should wonder if there were not some way of lightening the burden of so much needlework. He had been brought up in surroundings that naturally impressed him with the value of looms and new appliances for spinning and weaving. He understood the various processes of handling wool and cotton, although his own work lay outside them. His father had been a miller in the small Massachusetts town of Spencer, where Elias was born in 1819. New England was already building her textile factories, and when he was only six the boy joined his brothers and sisters at the work of sticking wire teeth through the straps of leather that were then used for cotton-cards. What he learned from books he had to pick up during a few weeks each summer at the district school. His health was delicate, and he was lame, unfitted to be a farmer, and his best place seemed to be in his father’s mill. But he was ambitious, and when he was sixteen, a friend having brought him glowing tales of the great cotton-mills in the fast-growing city of Lowell, he decided to seek his fortune there. The panic of 1837 closed the mills, and Howe found his course deflected to work in a machine-shop in Cambridge. By the time he came of age he had married and was living in Boston, working as a mechanic to support his family. Of a speculative turn of mind, he was constantly suggesting improvements at the shop, and his watching his wife labor with needle and thread turned his thoughts in the direction of a machine for sewing.