The well-known firm of Willcox & Gibbs, makers of a domestic chainstitch sewing machine, had an agent in Luton named Edward Stratford, and about 1870 his wife, in response to a friendly challenge, sewed the first straw hat from centre to circumference. The day following this epoch making occurrence Mrs. Stratford sewed another hat out of a fine make of “English China Purl” (a fine fancy edged plait); this hat is said to be still in existence. From 1870 the whole trade was revolutionized, all fine plaits eventually were sewn by machine, only the coarsest and broadest widths being sewn by hand. In 1874 Mr. Henry Bland, a Luton mechanic, turned his attention to making alterations to the Willcox & Gibbs’ domestic machine, in order to render it more suitable for sewing straw plait. He took out patents to cover his improvements, which were subsequently acquired by Messrs. Willcox & Gibbs, who issued the new machine to the Trade under the title of “The 10-Guinea” straw hat sewing machine. But this visible stitch machine had a fault which made it unsuitable for the best work, inasmuch as the stitch was prominent on the outside of the hat, and the demand for handsewn invisible stitch continued unabated for goods of the best quality. Various machines were introduced to imitate handsewing, most of them failures, but M. Légat, a Frenchman, patented one in 1875 that even up to the present time has never been surpassed for close resemblance in its work to that done by hand, but although the machine was taken up seriously by the best houses of Great Britain and France, its large initial cost, and heavy charges for maintenance, allowed it only to retain its supremacy pending the advent of a less intricate, delicate and costly model.