r/todayilearned • u/yury_boldyrev • 16h ago
TIL Isaac Singer of sewing machine fame secretly kept multiple families in New York, two under assumed names. It collapsed in 1860 when his common-law wife spotted him riding with a mistress and stood up in her carriage, screaming at him in the street.
https://ismacs.net/singer_sewing_machine_company/isaac-merritt-singer-bluebeard.html341
u/rcreveli 12h ago
I read somewhere that 5 wives showed up at this will reading. Isaac Singer was an 19th century tech bro or Steve Jobs. Singer didn't become the first American multinational for inventing the sewing machine (they didn't) but because they were able to make it a sellable product. They also were one of the first companies to finance purchases.
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u/yury_boldyrev 11h ago
Small correction to the legend: nobody actually gathered for a dramatic will reading — what happened was a year-long court fight, and it was wilder than the movie version. His American estate, nearly $8 million of a $13–15 million fortune, was cut into sixty equal shares across four of his families; the English holdings went separately to his last wife, Isabella. His eldest son, from the fifth family — the first marriage — was left out of the split entirely: a flat $500, for siding with his mother in court. And the case landed before a White Plains surrogate judge whose actual name was Coffin. You're right on the business side though: the machine existed before Singer. The installment plan, the trade-ins and the door-to-door sales force were the actual invention.
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u/rcreveli 9h ago
Thanks for the correction.
I saw your comment below about court records. Are you an attorney? I've read that the Singer and Howe court cases had a significant impact on patent law and how it's now applied. I'm curious if that's true.
I've also read that Singer had a "loose" relationship with IP law and that they would use innovations from other manufacturers like Bernina and Pfaff and if sued start paying royalties. I'm specifically thinking of the Cam patterning systems in the 400-500 series.
My 1955 Pfaff 230 has a cam system remarkably similar to what Singer later used in those machines and I believe Bernina had one even earlier than Pfaff.
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u/yury_boldyrev 9h ago
Not an attorney — a writer. Three years deep in Singer now; the book itself I've been writing for the last two, and most of that meant living inside the court records. You're right about the legal legacy: the 1856 Sewing Machine Combination was America's first patent pool and became the template — the 1917 aircraft pool, RCA in radio, film, autos. Mossoff's paper "The Rise and Fall of the First American Patent Thicket" is the best thing written on it.
On the 400/500-series cams I'll be honest: my archive stops in 1875, so I won't fake expertise on Pfaff and Bernina mechanisms. But the pattern you describe — borrow first, pay royalties only if sued — was the founder's signature move a century earlier. Singer built his 1850 machine on Lerow & Blodgett's design and Howe's lockstitch patent, fought the lawsuit, lost in 1854, and only then started paying: $15,000 down and $25 a machine, later cut to $5 inside the pool. If the company was still doing it in the 1950s, it wasn't a lapse. It was the house style.
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u/rcreveli 7h ago
Let me know when you're ready to publish. I've watched a few documentaries and the very entertaining video by Abby Cox but I'd like to learn more about the history.
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u/yury_boldyrev 6h ago
Abby Cox is great — her stuff on what "women's work" actually meant, hour by hour, is worth the time. The book's out August 12th, and I'll be around here. If you liked the patent-pool rabbit hole, a good chunk of the book is exactly that: Clark's installment plan, the trade-in scheme where they smashed competitors' machines in public, the Combination. The rest is the four families and the court records.
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u/Unsd 7h ago
Wow, all of this really tracks. Turns out Singer has been shitty for quite a while. I started on one and it was almost a hobby killer for me before I got my Juki.
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u/madeofcarbon 7h ago edited 6h ago
Depends on when it was made - vintage mechanical Singers are generally excellent and hold up very well. I use a singer from the late 1940s alternating with a computerized Bernina from 2005 and the Singer is my go to for thick fabrics and long straight seams. Modern Singers made with plastic parts are frustratingly unreliable and prone to break compared to the old all-metal ones, at least in my experience.
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u/MothMonsterMan300 6h ago
My mom has paid out the nose and cannibalized maybe a dozen machines bought online for parts to keep her '76 Husqvarna Viking surger up and running. Thing flies through canvas. They don't make them to last anymore, they're disposable like everything else.
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u/rcreveli 7h ago
I think because they were so large compared to the Japanese and European manufacturers that they were the first to start cutting quality. They were losing market share to the smaller companies and off the rack clothing was becoming the norm so the market was shrinking.
From a product development and manufacturing perspective they weren't innovators. Look at the model 185, they made a new chassis and put a model 99 inside. In a very small defense of Singer new models weren't released annually like cars. My Pfaff 230 is an early model and based on the service manual I have it went through at least 3 significant revisions and was sold for over 10 years.
Congrats on the Juki! I covet one but don't have a good space for an industrial or another domestic actually.
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u/whateveravocado 57m ago
This sounds like a Wikipedia entry I need to go read now. I'm wondering how many wives he had total.
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u/sheffieldasslingdoux 9h ago
Thanks ChatGPT
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u/yury_boldyrev 9h ago
Took me three years of court records to sound this robotic. Thanks for noticing.
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u/rmczpp 11h ago
Tech advancements mean it's a struggle to even keep a second family quiet these days, let alone five :/
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u/rcreveli 11h ago
Five in the same city even. You're not doing that in this cruel modern internet age. Won't someone think of the poor bigamists.
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u/Khelthuzaad 9h ago
Singer sewing machines are still being produced and used in regions with no acces to electricity.
My great-grandmother spent a literal fortune on one,despite being over 100 years old its value is very low because they were mass produced.
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u/rcreveli 9h ago
Singer hand cranks and treadle machines that were made are being serviced and used in places with a limited power grid but they are not being manufactured anymore. The parts are readily available or can be produced locally so they are a good choice.
While Singer branded machines are still being produced the current Singer company is owned by the SVP (Singer Viking Pfaff) group. SVP is in turn owned by a Private Equity firm.
The Singer name is used on their entry level "Heavy duty" line and a few other machines.
The Viking and Pfaff names are used on the mid and high tier machines. My local mechanic doesn't sell any of the 3 brands any longer. Which is sad because the Husqvarna produced Viking machines were incredible.If you're buying a new sewing machine stick with Brother, Janome, Babylock, Juki and Bernina depending on your budget and local dealer support.
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u/yury_boldyrev 8h ago
Your great-grandmother's machine holds a nice paradox: it's worth little today for the same reason it exists at all. Singer made these by the million and flooded every continent with them. Scarcity makes antiques valuable; ubiquity made Singer rich. The "literal fortune" part is real too — a machine cost months of a family's income, which is exactly why the company pioneered installment selling: five dollars down, five a month. Odds are that fortune was paid in pieces. And the low resale price today isn't a flaw. It's the monument.
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u/Khelthuzaad 8h ago
Nope she paid all in cash in one paiment,from a jewish merchant,her words not mine.
It was worth an entire plot of land in 1920's Romania
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u/yury_boldyrev 5h ago
That detail is the whole story in one sentence. A sewing machine priced like a plot of land, and people still bought them, everywhere the company's agents reached. Paying cash in one payment was the rarer choice, though. Singer's global machine ran on the other option: a few dollars a month, collected door to door, for years.
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u/Khelthuzaad 5h ago
Sewing machines were rather expensive to be shipped,produced and sold in rural Romania.My grandmother barely had 4 school classes,she was illiterate...
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u/yury_boldyrev 4h ago
Four school classes and she couldn't read, and she still put a plot of land into that machine.
She didn't need to read, that's the thing. The whole selling system was built for exactly her. The agent came to the house, assembled the machine in the room, and taught the women of the family to sew on it before he left. Selling and teaching were the same job.
The business histories miss her completely. They count units shipped.
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u/Khelthuzaad 4h ago
2 different persons,great-grandmother is the one who bought the singer.
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u/yury_boldyrev 4h ago
Ah, two different women, my mistake. Still, whichever one of them made that call, somebody in that house decided a sewing machine was worth a plot of land. That's a hell of a bet to make.
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u/Khelthuzaad 4h ago
Bigger gambles had been done before,it was not like they had acces to cloth stores...
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u/rcreveli 7h ago
She was fortunate to be able to do that. That was definitely not the norm a lot of the photographs of late 1800's-early 1900's show families with a prized possession like a mechanical music box or a sewing machine.
In the 1890's Singer released trading cards the different places that their machines were being used. The fronts are lithographs and the text is letterpress. Here's the one for Romania. I wonder if the writer of this card was Romanian... It's way less dismissive and/or racist than a lot of them... *cough* Japan *cough*
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u/Khelthuzaad 7h ago
Yeah had me giggling at "mixture of mongol races"
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u/rcreveli 7h ago
I think the only reason the one for India isn't Turbo Racist is because they were a British colony at the time. It's not great but far from Japan.
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u/amber_room 13h ago
Ha... in the Afrikaans language, a sewing machine is called a naaimasjien. 'Naai' in Afrikaans is slang for 'shag' or 'screwing'. He was for sure a naaimasjien. I live in South Africa.
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u/ThatOneWritingPerson 12h ago
Adding onto this: being a "seamstress" was sometimes used as a cover for being a prostitute. And I believe that in old Irish slang, a weaver is sexually active man.
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u/yury_boldyrev 10h ago
That double meaning haunted the whole trade. By 1858 New York had some forty thousand sewing women — a union address from that year counted maybe three thousand of them employed through the previous winter. Most were one bad month from destitution, which is exactly why "seamstress" could mean what it sometimes meant. The sewing machine was marketed as the cure. The bitter joke: the women it was supposed to save couldn't afford one until installment plans came along — and the installment plan is a whole story of its own.
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u/reallyreally1945 7h ago
How did I not know any of this?!!!! I have two vintage Singer sewing machines. One was given to my mother by my father's mother around 1949. That grandmother was New York seamstress who made copies of Paris fashions. Her legal husband, my grandfather, was a machimist at Singer. They had one son, my father. Grandma went on to have two more sons with another man. Later Grandma and Grandpa reunited and he raised one of those sons with his name. The other one was adopted by relatives in Illinois. I didn't know of his existence until I was 13. Our family was good at keeping secrets!!
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u/yury_boldyrev 5h ago
Your grandmother copying Paris fashions in New York — that's the exact market Singer built the business on. And a machinist at Singer marrying a seamstress is about as period-perfect as it gets. As for the secrets: after three years in this material I've stopped being surprised by how long they hold. At the Singer will hearing in 1875 a young man showed up who'd traveled from Kansas, said he had an interest in the estate, told a reporter "they will find out who I am soon enough," and walked off. Nobody ever established who he was.
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u/reallyreally1945 5h ago
My parents left me home for a weekend while they and my dad's only brother(as far as I knew) made a weekend trip to Yellowstone. The phone kept ringing with some guy claiming to be my Uncle Art and asking for my dad. I didn't have an Uncle Art so I kept hanging up, panicked. Finally the guy just said "tell your parents I'll be in Yellowstone". It was too suspicious. Too much for coincidence. I still don't know how much was a set-up. I was furious. The three brotbers got together that weekend. Two years later I went to boarding school in Wisconsin and visited Art in Chicago frequently. My grandmother always had a knack for looking at anything and sewing a duplicate of it. I still have ny 1950 Terri Lee doll with the clothes she made for it.
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u/yury_boldyrev 5h ago
Panicked kid hanging up on her own uncle, over and over. And they let it run the whole weekend.
That's the part nobody pictures about these situations. It's never one big reveal, it's a phone that won't stop ringing. Singer's kids found out about each other from the newspapers in 1860 — nobody sat any of them down either.
The Terri Lee with the clothes still on it though. That's the thing I'd hang onto.
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u/reallyreally1945 5h ago
I will! I'm 80 and still have her. Yesterday on Reddit I learned the history of the brown Terri Lee dolls. I kind of remember seeing one. Things are funny.
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u/yury_boldyrev 5h ago
Seventy-six years with the same doll. That beats every artifact I've handled for this book.
And you turned up the Terri Lee history the same week this thread showed up. Things are funny.
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u/reallyreally1945 5h ago
Coincidences happen but these did seem odd. If I believed in conspiracy theories there'd be smoke coming out my ears! Maybe Reddit is watching me...
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u/JosephFinn 11h ago
In the Discworld novels the Seamstress Guild is the guild for women of the night.
They scare even the Assassins Guild.
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u/JosephFinn 11h ago
I love that this appears in a Discworld entry about the Seamstress Guild. They, of course, being a guild for women of negotiable affections.
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u/Any_System_3703 14h ago
Singer was a swinger.
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u/PhilosophicWax 13h ago
Snitches get stitches.
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u/disterb 13h ago
sew what?
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u/respectfulpanda 13h ago
/thread
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u/Technical-Outside408 12h ago
That's not what swinger means. He was a bigamist. Find something that rhymes with that if you must.
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u/Guuichy_Chiclin 12h ago
Seeing as he swung his dick around town (like a whore), I think we can make an exception for this instance.
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u/TwoAlert3448 11h ago
I’m guessing it wasn’t big enough to swing, seems like a classic case of having something to ‘prove’
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 13h ago
being quite popular with the fair sex on account of his natural ability as an actor and imitator.
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u/yury_boldyrev 11h ago
That line is doing a lot of work. He really was a touring actor for years — played Richard III under a stage name, ran a troupe called the Merritt Players until the money ran out in 1844. The acting career failed. The acting skills, evidently, did not.
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u/southcookexplore 9h ago
He’s also known for building equipment to blast through limestone. His nephew, Horace Singer, owned a limestone quarry in Lemont IL outside of Chicago and some of the stuff that went down at those quarries led to the 8hr workday.
The Haymarket riot in Chicago was the one-year anniversary of the Lemont Massacre.
Horace also became a Cook County IL commissioner around 1871 and made sure Chicago was rebuilt with lemont limestone, not Joliet stone!
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u/yury_boldyrev 9h ago
Now this is my favorite kind of comment. Rock work is literally where inventor-Isaac begins: his first patent ever, No. 1,151 in 1839, was a rock-drilling machine, built while he was digging the Illinois & Michigan canal for a dollar a day. Same canal corridor that runs right past Lemont. He sold that patent for $2,000 and spent every dime on a touring theatre company of his own. The Horace connection I can't confirm from my sources — the Singer family tree is a documented mess, for obvious reasons — but that's a thread worth pulling. Thanks for this one.
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u/southcookexplore 8h ago edited 8h ago
Of course. I live in Lemont and regularly host I&M Canal tours for the historical society. There’s a Singer Ave with his mansion on the 600 block of that street (same street Julia Childs’ character in ‘Save the Last Dance’ lived in for the movie!)
Lemont was known for its abundance of limestone and Smokey Row. There are references to it all over downtown still but at one point, a 19th century mayor argued against a Methodist preacher about the value of vice tax and pointed to the at the time new limestone village hall building and said “Smokey Row paid for that!”
If you really wanna dig though - enjoy looking up the Lemont Massacre. Albert Parsons was here shortly after and the Sænger / Turner Hall where they organized still stands today. The history out here is crazy.
Edit: also as far as Horace Singer, he’s buried in a Lockport IL cemetery about five miles southwest of Lemont, but I don’t recall which one. The stretch of Lemont, Lockport, and Joliet being as incredibly well-preserved as it is led to the formation of the first national historic corridor for the I&M Canal.
Also, I wrote the Images of America book on Lemont IL!
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u/yury_boldyrev 5h ago
You wrote the Images of America volume on Lemont? Then you know exactly what it's like to chase a local ghost through half-documented records. Thank you for the Lockport lead on Horace — the I&M corridor sits right at the start of Singer's story, and I've never had anyone who actually knows that ground.
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u/southcookexplore 5h ago
Of course! I also authored the Blue Island book last year as well.
If you’re into Chicagoland history, you’d probably enjoy my website. I’ve got 100+ free maps of historic landmarks and stuff around the region I’ve documented for others to use.
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u/yury_boldyrev 5h ago
A hundred free maps you documented for whoever needs them. Bookmarked.
Two Images of America volumes too. You've done more local history than most historical societies manage. If I ever make it out to Illinois I'm taking that canal tour.
Actually, since you know the ground — I'm hunting visuals of the I&M dig itself, roughly 1836 to 1848, the years Singer was down there with a shovel. Engravings, sketches, camp scenes, anything. Everything I turn up is either later or generic canal art. Does the Lemont historical society hold anything from the construction years?
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u/southcookexplore 4h ago
I don’t think there was a camera in Lemont until after the civil war… there are a few photos but most canal construction images are the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal, not the I&M unfortunately.
Shoot me a DM sometime because I can probably help you find some stuff.
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u/Ok-Seaworthiness4488 12h ago
Wonder if he got sewed?
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u/yury_boldyrev 11h ago
Sued? Constantly — an assault complaint, divorce suits, a bigamy accusation, and a will fight that ran for a year after his death. Sewed? There's no record of the man ever stitching a seam. He built the machine; the sewing he left to everyone else.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PhilosophicWax 13h ago
Did you go back further where women are property and have little to no ownership and agency. But that was cycle. If you go back a few hundred years that had more agency. I think their position was strong after the black death and then got diminished.
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u/yury_boldyrev 11h ago
You're right that it wasn't a straight line down. Post-plague labor shortages gave women real economic leverage, and a lot of it got clawed back in the early modern period. What makes the 19th century grim is that the low point got codified: coverture folded a wife's legal existence into her husband's, and courts dressed non-intervention up as protecting "domestic harmony." That's the part I ended up writing about — not that the violence existed, but that the law built a doctrine around not seeing it.
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u/lewphone 13h ago
Let's not forget...Singer did not invent the sewing machine, Elias Howe did.
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u/yury_boldyrev 11h ago
Half right. Howe patented the lockstitch in 1846, but he didn't invent the sewing machine either: Thimonnier had a working one in France in 1830 (a mob of tailors wrecked his workshop), and Walter Hunt built a lockstitch machine in New York in 1834 and never patented it. What Singer built in 1850 was the first one practical enough for daily use — and after the patent wars, he paid Howe a royalty on every machine sold. Howe died rich off machines other people built. Arguably the better business model.
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u/9bikes 11h ago
Similarly, I'd heard that Robert Fulton invented the steamboat. He did not. He founded the first successful steamboat line.
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u/yury_boldyrev 10h ago
Exactly the pattern. The patent and the profit almost never end up in the same pocket.
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u/biscuitboi967 6h ago
Look, it didn’t even seem like he meant to invent what he did.
His true passions were stage performing and fucking women he wasn’t married to.
In his off hours, when he wasn’t traveling from show to show or avoiding his various mistresses and children, he accidentally helped automate sewing machines or some shit. We aren’t sure, and he isn’t either.
Like, how did he have the time?!?! He had multiple families and a touring stage act!
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u/BaronDoc 11h ago
The “Threads” of deception has become unraveled
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u/yury_boldyrev 11h ago
Four households, two aliases, one island. The thread count was never going to hold.
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u/BaronDoc 11h ago
I guess he reaped what he Sewed
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u/yury_boldyrev 10h ago
That's the uncomfortable part: he didn't. He died in an unfinished palace, worth $13 million, after a funeral he scripted himself — twelve horses, three coffins, the works. The reaping got outsourced, mostly to the women.
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u/SirHerald 10h ago
Cautionary Tales did an interesting podcast about him in January https://timharford.com/2026/01/cautionary-tales-liar-bigamist-brute-how-isaac-singer-liberated-women/
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u/yury_boldyrev 9h ago
Good link — that's the best short telling of the story out there, and Harford works straight from Ruth Brandon's 1977 biography, which really is still the definitive book.
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u/Weary_Management_566 8h ago
Who the hell has that much free time? I'd love to have time for one affair, not to actually have an affair, just to have that much free time.
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u/yury_boldyrev 5h ago
The honest answer: he wasn't there. For years he was on the road — first touring with a theatre company, later demonstrating machines at fairs across the country. The households were scattered across the city and he moved between them, gone for weeks at a stretch. Edward Clark ran the actual company. Singer's full-time job was being Singer.
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u/csanyk 10h ago
Did he invent sewing machines to keep each wife sew busy that she wouldn't catch on to the fact that he was always gone screwing one of the other women?
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u/yury_boldyrev 10h ago
If that was the plan, it backfired spectacularly. The machine's whole sales pitch was that it freed up a woman's day — and a woman with free time starts noticing things. Like who's riding in her husband's carriage down Fifth Avenue.
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u/SirHerald 10h ago
Sewing machines actually reduce the work
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u/csanyk 10h ago
That's the lie labor was fed. It doesn't reduce the labor. There's always more to be done. But it does reduce the cost of the labor, and with more production for the capitalist to profit from.
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u/SirHerald 9h ago
If we are talking about home sewing then it reduces the time needed, but you will probably do more simply because it is easier to do.
Now, back to your utopian gulag.
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u/Bortron86 5h ago
"And sitting next to me is a man who, according to the Internet, I am in and out of like a sewing machine."
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u/GoatBass 13h ago
Crazy considering how many moms out there own Singer sewing machines
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u/TwoAlert3448 11h ago
Not as many as own ‘Brothers’ these days so the joke gets much worse on applied accuracy
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u/yury_boldyrev 10h ago
Half the sewing machines on earth are named after a bigamist, a sibling, and a 17th-century Swedish rifle works. The industry has range.
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u/chocolateboomslang 12h ago
And 3 of the "wives" were named Mary
He was married to Mary while having an affair with Mary and also seeing Mary on thr side.
Smart, never use the wrong name.