this ancient machine. The motion of the shuttle is positive, that is, uniform, direct and unvarying. Its flight is indefinitely prolonged, and it is now possible to weave fabrics of any width. It is this simple improvement

James Gazell

that has filled our stores with "extra wide" goods and given us a style of fabrics never known before.

Mr. James Lyall was born in 1836, and still lives and works in this city, enjoying the secure rewards of his invention. The fashionable shopper on

West Twenty-third Street little heeds the fact that at the foot of the street is the loom factory that through the chain of history is linked with France, England and Egypt. There were no bonfires in Madison Square to destroy the first positive-motion loom, no riotous weavers about the ferry landing to drive the inventor from the town, for a happier and perhaps a more just and honorable spirit, has come over the history of inventions.

The accompanying picture of a loom illustrates the new positive-motion system not so much in weaving wide fabrics as in showing another phase of the invention. If the shuttle can be drawn forward and backward through the loom, there is no reason why the cord may not be extended and a series of shuttles attached to it in a train and a number of looms be united in one machine. This is shown by the illustration, a group of looms being united in one frame and all their shuttles moving in unison, weaving several fabrics at once.

The literature of the sewing machine is much like the machine itself. If you bravely start to examine it critically you will find the same delightful confusion, the same voluble insistance on insignificant details that beset the purchaser of a machine. It is said by those familiar with the subject that the American feminine mind has acquired a new character since the days of Elias Howe, and that having heard the oration of one dealer concerning a particular machine it ever after refuses to believe that any other machine has any merits whatever. The legal, technical and historical papers written on the sewing machine make a literature as voluminous as the printed allurements of the dealers and as racy and readable as a patent office report. Its history alone concerns us, and the long and winding stream, turbid with the sediment of technics, can be clarified by the name of Elias Howe. Many minds had been at work on the search for some mechanism that would sew fabrics before the young Howe approached the subject. Sewing by machinery had even been performed in a certain way; one of these machines, in which a double-pointed needle with an eye in the middle passed completely through the fabric, still surviving in the present Bonnaz embroidery machine. This machine was a suggestion that sprang naturally from hand sewing, and Howe, while he perhaps never heard of such a machine till after he had made a better, followed at first this false scent after a machine sewer.

In brief, Elias Howe made machine sewing practical. Many attempts had been made. His alone was successful. He made the machine that would sew, and, after all, this is the thing. He is justly the inventor, and it is now so recognized.

The accompanying cut of Howe's original machine hardly suggests the

modern machine of any style, and yet it contains the germinal idea from which they all sprang. The eye-pointed needle, vibrated by a lever, carried the thread through the fabric suspended vertically on the series of pins on a plate that moved before the needle. The loop was formed in the thread for the lock-stitch by a shuttle, and these, with the curved arm, form the essential features of Howe's invention. The development of the modern machines, with their attachments and improvements, sprang from many minds. Once the road was opened, hundreds of workers flocked in to occupy and improve the marvelous country. Others saw it afar off and toiled blindly on to reach it. Howe opened the gate and an army of workers followed his steps, paying tribute to the leader, and yet doing what he could not do-bringing to the new field a vast multitude of improvements and additions. Howe's machine was, and is, a mechanical and financial success, and all men and women have shared in the immense wealth his ideas gave to the country.

The story of Howe's life needs no rehearsing. He only left us in 1867. No American boy or girl should fail to read his life, if for no other reason than for the lessons of patience, of earnest struggle with poverty and failure through the long warfare for his rights to the grand triumph at the end. The life-history of such a man is worth more than the biography of any king or general.

The first Christian century saw in Gaul the earliest hint of a mechanical idea that now controls the markets of the world. The farmer in Gaul used the original harvesting machine. It consisted of a large box or frame of wood mounted on two wheels, and driven "cart before the horse" fashion through the fields of ripe grain. The shafts were behind, and an ox was harnessed with his head to the cart and the traces fastened to the shafts. On the front of the vehicle were placed finger-like knives, side by side, and as the machine advanced through the grain, these knives, like teeth, tore off the heads of the grain and dropped them into the cart. The machine disappeared for centuries, to reappear in Illinois in the grain header and in the clover-harvester. Neither of these machines was a copy of the old harvester in Gaul, except in the retention of the idea of a finger-like series of knives for twitching off the heads of the grain or clover. The historical point of interest is in the curious survival of the finger-bar in the modern reaper. The knives now move with a shearing motion between fixed fingers. The horse has come round to the front, and the knives and fingers have dropped down to the ground at one side of the machine, and the motion of the machine itself is imparted to the vibrating knives.

Ideas seem to be epidemic. Many minds appear to be illuminated at once, and to bring forth much the same idea in different parts of the world at the same time. The early part of this century saw the birth of a number of mechanical devices for reaping by horse power. One machine out of a multitude had the right germinal idea. One young man on a Virginia farm, after seeing his father try for years to make a practical reaper, grasped the details of the problem, conceived the right mechanical devices for overcoming the difficulties of the problem, and made and used the first reaper that was both a mechanical and a commercial success.

Cyrus Hall McCormick observed that the finger-like knives must move. The knives were in use in Gaul in A.D. 70; they were joined together and made to vibrate sideways by connections with the driving-wheel of the machine in Virginia in A.D. 1831. Spear-shaped fingers gathered the stalks to the shearing knives, a revolving reel pressed the grain over the knives. Bell, in England, had thought of that last in 1826, yet with curious backward glance he kept the old Gaul's idea of placing the cart before the horse. His machine was not a success, and McCormick's ideas alone were

fruitful in the million or more harvesters that have gathered the grain crops of the world.

McCormick escaped the personal trials that beset such men as Jacquard or Kay; yet he, like Howe, fought a good fight for his ideas. As in

Whitney's case, his ideas were of such transcendent value that the national conscience seemed to be too weak to resist the temptation to use his property by withholding a renewal of his patents. It, after all, mattered little, for the grand lessons of this man's life-history are found in his clear, sharp reasoning on the actual mechanical details of the problem he set before himself, in the simple and direct solution he offered, and the courage and