sewing is an art form that is over 20,000 years old.
In the present days though, many of us do not realize
how much the modern civilization owes to the advent of
the needle. Needles may appear to many of us as
commonplace articles. However, it is not hard for one to
imagine of the thousand-and-one uses for which a needle
is used - for sewing our clothes, our shoes, and many of
our household articles, even the books we read, are all
made with its aid.
The first sewing
needles were made of bones or animal horns and the first
thread was made of animal sinew.
Although needles have been used from earliest times,
there is hardly any person who can tell you their
complete history, for they have been there from remote
antiquity, and commonly used that nobody thought it
worth to preserve their recorded history.
If we try to
trace the early origins of needles, we will immediately
come to the conclusion they were necessary even in
prehistoric times, as they are to us today. Needles have
been discovered in Egyptian tombs, and in ancient cave
dwellings. Some of the early needles were made up of
fish-bone, wood, ivory, and were thick and heavy as
compared with the modern needles. Although, some of them
had eyes at the end or in middle, many of them had a
hook at the end. It has been discovered that in recent
times the Red Indian and other primitive tribes used the
slender wing-bones of birds as needles, drawing sinews
through the hides to sew them into garments for the cold
seasons. Until recent times, the gypsies continued to
use thorns boiled in oil to harden them as pins.
If we turn to
the Bible and the Holy Quran to look for answers, we
find that the two books make a mention of needles in
their texts. The chapter 7:40 of The Holy Quran makes a
mention of needle in this verse. According to one of the
early traditions that have been quoted in Zamakhshari in
his famous commentary of the Holy Quran - Tafseer al-Kashshaf
- relates that Adam (as) the first human being created
by man brought with him from Paradise "five things made
of iron viz: an anvil, a pair of tongs, two hammers, a
greater and a lesser, and a needle." According to this
account, the knowledge of the use of needle was passed
down from God to man along with other things, after he
was first created, and he in turn must have passed the
knowledge of its use to others who came after him, and
from them it was carried to different parts of the
earth. During the time of Prophet Mohammed (saws) the
people of Arabia were familiar with the use of needles.
the Bronze Age, it was discovered that better and
smaller needles could be made from a new material. But
there were also large needles, made in Greece to fasten
the flowing robes of the Greek women. The Romans in the
Iron Age, and in the Christian Era used both bronze and
ivory needles. It is possible that some of them may have
used needles made from silver. Fine pins made of silver
were found in the tombs of Peruvians who lived in the
Bronze Age when they were discovered by the Spaniards.
believed that the Chinese were the first to perfect the
art of manufacturing a steel needle. Some researchers
trace its origins to India. During the Abassid era, the
Arab merchants carried an extensive trade with far-flung
countries of the world to obtain scarce metals. The
Abassids imported the technologically advanced alloy of
iron, which was similar to steel from India, and then
processed it, and fashioned them into different iron
tools, and perfected the art of making needles, at the
famous centers of weapons manufacture in Damascus and
Toledo, the cities, which had won fame all over the
world for making swords and other blades.
this time, the science of Arab medcine had developed
rapidly. The Arab armies after Prophet Mohammed had
marched into Egypt in the year 639 CE and later
traversed North Africa and had conquered Spain. In the
year 641 CE Alexandria was captured by the Arabs. Here,
the Arabs came across a great mass of ancient medical
manuscripts, which had been gathered into a library. The
Muslim armies, on contrary to the general belief held by
many, rescued these manuscripts from the famous library
before it was burned. The Muslims had developed a
passion for old classics - they had translated earlier
many of medical manuscripts of the Nestorian monks into
Arabic - and they were among the treasures that were
carried with them to Spain. Under their rule, the city
of Cordova (Qurtuba) in Muslim Spain became the
principal center of medical learning in the world. One
of the greatest teachers of medical sciences in those
times was Abul Qasim al-Zahrawi (936 -1013 CE) - known
as Abulcasis to the West - and the author of Al-Tasrif.
He was born in Al-Zahara near Cordova, and was
appointed as a Court Physician by Abdul Rahman III
because of the distinction he had attained in the field
of surgery. In his time, Cordova was a populous city,
which contained fifty hospitals and a medical library of
100,000 volumes. Al-Zahrawi had personally collected
over five hundred works on surgery and his medical
courses were attended by surgeons from every part of
Europe. He is credited as the first among the surgeons
of the world who rescued surgery from the hands of the
ignorant charlatans, and developing it into the best
form that the sciences could offer anywhere in that day.
Zahrawi’s book Al-Tasrif was a complete treatise on
surgery as practised by the learned Arab doctors of
was an encyclopedia of medicne and modern surgery, a
portion of the encyclopedia devoted to surgery was
published seperately and became the first independent
illustrated work on the subject. It contained
illustrations of a remarkable array of surgical
instruments, which incuded medical needles for suturing
wounds, and described the operations of fractures,
dislocations, bladder stone, gangrene and other
conditions. Al-Zahrawi's work was later translated by
Guy de Chauliac, one of the greatest surgeons of
medieval times, and in this manner, it found its way
into the different libraries of Europe. His book
replaced Paul of Aegina's
- which was used as a standard work for surgery in
Europe - and it remained as the most used book on
surgery for the next five hundred years.
next Muslim physcian to achieve distinction in the field
of medicine and surgery was Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik
(1091 -1161 CE) - known as Avenzoar in the West. He
was one of the greatest physicans and surgeons of the
Middle Ages. He has been declared by historians as the
greatest among Muslim physicans since Al-Razi and Galen.
He was born at Seville and graduated from Cordova
Medical University. After a brief stay in Baghdad and
Cairo, he returned to Spain to work as a physican. Later
he worked for Abd-ul-Mumin, the first Muwahid ruler as a
Court Physican and as a minister. Besides excelling as a
physcian, he made important contributions to the field
of surgery. He was proficient in the art of dissecting
dead human bodies with different surgical instruments
known in his time and knew human anatomy in detail. His
operation techniques were superb. He was the first
person to perfect the operation of tracheotomy and
practised direct feeding into the gullet where normal
feeding was not possible. Among the many books he has
written Al-Teiser ("Assistance") was widely translated
and had much to do, brinnging the later medical
renaissance in Europe in the field of medicine, surgery,
and surgical instruments.
the period in which the Arabs were driven out of Spain
in the fifteenth century, they managed to take with them
nearly all their precious books and scrolls, which
contained among other subjects a wealth of knowledge
relating to the fields of medicne and surgery. The
Spanish conquerors who were Christians contemptouosly
passed them over as a mass of waste paper and did not
interfere with their transportation. The expelled Arabs,
who had by then mastered the art of making needles, and
their use in surgery, carried their knowledge with them
to diffferent parts of the Muslim world, and these
documents found their way intact into the Land of Arabia
and Palestine. The art of manufacturing the present day
needles contnued to be the monopoly of the Arabs, and
started trading them in different parts of Europe.
manufacture of needles, which was brought to Europe, and
Western Asia by the Arabs - who kept the art a secret
until the year 1650 - began in England by the middle of
the seventeenth century. At first, needles were made by
hand - a laborious process - but later wondeful machines
were developed to manufacture them with absolute
accuracy by the millions, a process that continues at
present days too. Today, the finest grade of steel,
which is chemically treated by an elaborate process is
employed in the use of making the world's best needles
to bring in it a tough and elastic temper.
times immemorial, the needles were employed to hold the
garments on a person in place. However, there was a
disadvantage, for the needles pricked. The early
Egyptians had solved this problem by making eight-inch
long bronze pins with beautifully decorated gold heads.
The Greeks and the Romans fashioned the heads of needles
in the shape of serpents, horses or other abstract
designs. They used them to hold their tunics and gowns
in place, for the buttons that fit into the slots had
not been devised. Everyone wore these pins in Medieval
Europe, the rich according to their wealth and rank; and
the poor with crude modern skewers, until the invention
of the modern safety pin.
the "modern" safety pin was not invented until the year
1825. Walter Hunt was a New York inventor in need of
some fast cash. He owed a friend fifteen dollars and
decided to come up with the money, by inventing
something the world needed. That something, he decided
was a pin, which would hold things together, but did not
prick the wearer. He drew a sketch of it in a mere three
hours, and came up with the idea of a clasp pin, with a
guard covering the sharp point. He also made a model of
it and sold the rights of his invention for four hundred
dollars. And, that was all the money he made from this
million dollar idea!
safety-pin was not the last invention Hunt was to lose
out on. In 1832 - fifteen years before Elias Howe - Hunt
had invented a crude sewing machine and urged his
daughter to manufacture it. But his daughter refused to
have anything to do with a machine that would put
thousands of poor seamstresses out of work overnight.
Her father finally agreed with her and promply dropped
possible patent connected to mechanical sewing was a
1755 British patent issued to German, Charles Weisenthal.
Weisenthal was issued a patent for a needle that was
designed for a machine, however, the patent did not
describe the rest of the machine if one existed.
inventor and cabinet maker, Thomas Saint was issued the
first patent for a complete machine for sewing in 1790.
It is not known if Saint actually built a working
prototype of his invention. The patent describes an awl
that punched a hole in leather and passed a needle
through the hole. A later reproduction of Saint's
invention based on his patent drawings did not work.
In 1810, German,
Balthasar Krems invented an automatic machine for sewing
caps. Krems did not patent his invention and it never
Josef Madersperger made several attempts at inventing a
machine for sewing and was issued a patent in 1814. All
of his attempts were considered unsuccessful.
In 1804, a French
patent was granted to Thomas Stone and James Henderson
for "a machine that emulated hand sewing." That same
year a patent was granted to Scott John Duncan for an
"embroidery machine with multiple needles." Both
inventions failed and were soon forgotten by the public.
In 1818, the
first American sewing machine was invented by John Adams
Doge and John Knowles. Their machine failed to sew any
useful amount of fabric before malfunctioning.
functional sewing machine was invented by the French
tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in 1830. Thimonnier's
machine used only one thread and a hooked needle that
made the same chain stitch used with embroidery. The
inventor was almost killed by an enraged group of French
tailors who burnt down his garment factory because they
feared unemployment as a result of his new invention.
built America's first (somewhat) successful sewing
machine. He later lost interest in patenting because he
believed his invention would cause unemployment. (Hunt's
machine could only sew straight steams.) Hunt never
patented and in 1846, the first American patent was
issued to Elias
Howe for "a
process that used thread from two different sources."
Howe's machine had a needle with an eye at the point.
The needle was pushed through the cloth and created a
loop on the other side; a shuttle on a track then
slipped the second thread through the loop, creating
what is called the lockstitch. However, Elias Howe later
encountered problems defending his patent and marketing
For the next nine
years Elias Howe struggled, first to enlist interest in
his machine, then to protect his patent from imitators.
His lockstitch mechanism was adopted by others who were
developing innovations of their own. Isaac Singer
invented the up-and-down motion mechanism, and Allen
Wilson developed a rotary hook shuttle.
did not go into mass production until the 1850's, when
Isaac Singer built the first commercially successful
machine. Singer built the first sewing machine where the
needle moved up and down rather than the side-to-side
and the needle was powered by a foot treadle. Previous
machines were all hand-cranked. However, Isaac Singer's
machine used the same lockstitch that Howe had patented.
Elias Howe sued Isaac Singer for
patent infringement and won in 1854. Walter Hunt's sewing machine also used a lockstitch
with two spools of thread and an eye-pointed needle;
however, the courts upheld Howe's patent since Hunt had
abandoned his patent. If Hunt had patented his
invention, Elias Howe would have lost his case and Isaac
Singer would have won.
spite of the progress made by the sewing machines in
stitiching our clothes, the use of the needle still
continues to be used in modern times for a wide variety