“Man is a tool-using animal. Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.... Man is a tool-using animal, of which truth, clothes are but one example.”--_Sartor Resartus._ In looking through the records of man’s achievements to find the beginnings of inventions, we discover the glimmering of a change in the form of the immemorial needle, in an English patent granted to Charles F. Weisenthal, June 24, 1775. It was a needle with a centrally located eye, and with both ends pointed, designed for embroidery work by hand, and the object of the two points was to prevent the turning of the needle end for end after its passage through the cloth. But it was not until the 19th century that the idea was reduced to practice in sewing machines. To Thomas Saint, a cabinet maker by trade, of Greenhills Rents, in the Parish of St. Sepulchre, Middlesex County, England, the world is indebted for the first clear conception of a sewing machine. Saint’s attention was attracted to the slow way of sewing boots and shoes and other leather work, so he determined to improve the method. He took out a patent September 17, 1790, and although the germs of some of the leading parts of the modern sewing machine are there described, it does not appear that his patent was applied to practice. In fact, it slumbered in the archives of the British patent office for two generations, and after the leading sewing machines of the century had been invented and introduced, before it was rediscovered, and its contents appreciated in the light of more recent developments. Probably Saint’s machine, if constructed in accordance with his plans, would not have done much good work, certainly not with woven cloth, as he proposed to employ a hooked needle to carry a loop through the material, which would have been snarled by the cloth threads; but from his drawings and description it is clearly established that he was first to conceive of a vertically reciprocating needle for forming a seam from a continuous thread drawn from a spool; a seam in which each loop is locked, or enchained with a subsequent loop, to form what is known as the chain, or single thread stitch; and a horizontal sliding plate, to support the material to be sewed, and by which the material was also moved sideways after each stitch.