December 30, 2024 • 36 mins
A lot of sewing techniques being taught and used today came from the mind of one innovator: Helen Blanchard. She held 28 patents, most related to sewing, and she shaped the way the garment industry functioned.
Research:
- “1854 – Walter Hunt’s Patent Model of a Sewing Machine.” Smithsonian. National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1070410
- “1873 - Helen A. Blanchard's Sewing machine Patent Model (buttonhole).” Smithsonian. National Museum of American History. https://www.si.edu/object/1873-helen-blanchards-sewing-machine-patent-model-buttonhole%3Anmah_1069711
- “A Woman’s Pluck.” The Portland Daily Press. Aug. 24, 1886. https://www.newspapers.com/image/875134248/?match=1&terms=%22Helen%20A.%20blanchard%22
- Blanchard, Helen A. “Improvement in Sewing Machines.” USPO. Aug. 19, 1873. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/11/99/2a/c5331644eba132/US141987.pdf
- Blanchard, Helen A. “IMPROVEMENT IN ELASTIC GORINGS FOR SHOES.” USPO. Sept. 14, 1875. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/e4/91/7f/d5eca5e95653b8/US167732.pdf
- Blanchard, Helen A. “IMPROVEMENT IN ELASTIC SEAMS FOR GARMENTS.” USPO. April 13, 1875. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/22/f6/ab/176ada1cf78526/US162019.pdf
- Blanchard, Helen. A. “Surgical Needle.” USPO. Oct. 9, 1894. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/55/6a/29/283ec2c85e7b0d/US527263.pdf
- Blanchard, Helen A. “Improvement in Welted and Covered Seams.” USPO. Aug. 19, 1875. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7b/34/59/3e6a0f48970df6/US174764.pdf
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "panic." Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Apr. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/money/panic-economics
- DiPhilippo, Kathryn Onos. “Window on the Past – Local Women in History: Helen Blanchard.” Portland Herald. June 24, 2020. https://www.pressherald.com/2020/06/24/window-on-the-past-6/#:~:text=Around%201881%2C%20Helen%20and%20Louise%20Blanchard%20started,own%20company%2C%20the%20Blanchard%20Overseam%20Machine%20Company.
- “Helen A. Blanchard has filed …” The Philadelphia Inquirer. Dec. 23, 1900. https://www.newspapers.com/image/168365258/?match=1&terms=%22Helen%20A.%20blanchard%22
- “Helen Blanchard: Sewing Machine Improvements.” Lemelson-MIT. https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/helen-blanchard
- “Helen Blanchard - Zig-Zag Sewing Machine.” National Inventors Hall of Fame. https://www.invent.org/inductees/helen-blanchard
- Herzberg, Rudolph, tr. By Upfield Green. “The Sewing machine: Its History, Construction, and Application.” London. E. & F.N. Spon. 1864. https://archive.org/details/sewingmachineit00herzgoog
- “Miss Helen Blanchard … “ Portland Sunday Telegraph. Dec. 3, 1899. https://www.newspapers.com/image/846596628/?match=1&terms=%22Helen%20A.%20blanchard%22
- “Motor and Lumber Companies Incorporated.” Boston Evening Transcript. May 09, 1900. https://www.newspapers.com/image/735352621/?match=1&terms=%22Helen%20A.%20blanchard%22
- “NO AUCTION SALE.” Portland Sunday Telegram. Jan 31, 1915. https://www.newspapers.com/image/846796566/?match=1&terms=%22Helen%20A.%20blanchard%22
- “The Portland Advertiser states … “ Bangor Daily Whig and Courier. Jul. 09, 1853. https://www.newspapers.com/image/663005747/?match=1&terms=thomas%20knight%20shipyard%20fire
- Stanley, Autumn. “Mothers and Daughters of Invention.” Rutgers University Press. 1995.
- “Superior Court.” The Portland Daily Press. Dec 22, 1900. https://www.newspapers.com/image/875209480/?match=1&terms=%22Helen%20A.%20blanchard%22
- Willard, Frances Elizabeth. “A Woman of the Century.” Moulton. January 1893. Accessed online: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=zXEEAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-zXEEAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1
- “Woman Inventor Was Last of an Old Time Family.” Evening Express. Jan 13, 1922. https://www.newspapers.com/image/851331069/?article=4c97fcf5-4fbc-4149-8dc4-4160e6411049
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Yon
Mattzaliger not that long ago, and my apologies because we
have another inventory. I think that's fine, and specifically one
(00:24):
that works in apparel. This is also just a time
of year where I am, I don't know why, hyper
focused on sewing. This seems totally reasonable to me. I
think part of it is that, like there's a little
bit of time off, so I have a little more
time to sew. But also it's like, as we all know,
(00:46):
I love a plan and a calendar, and I can
like plan out my projects for the next year, and
I'm in that mindset. So that's what's going on. And
of course that means that I'm reading a lot of
sewing information and I'm always casting about for interesting stuff
about stitching, and then I run across fun things and
then I'm like, ooh, I should talk about that on
a show. If you are a stitcher or if you
(01:07):
just like a person that likes to follow sewing accounts
on social media, those exist. They're very soothing, but you
will often you know, there are a lot of accounts
that are wonderful that will show all kinds of tutorials
for various techniques or tools that will improve your sewing.
And the thing is, a lot of those techniques trace
back to one woman who was kind of using her
(01:30):
ingenuity at the time to survive. But she's the person
who developed a lot of them, although for the industrial space,
not really the homesowist. So we're going to talk about
her today because she is Helen A Blanchard, but there
are a lot of aspects to her story that are
really lacking. There are just big chunks of her life
where we don't have a lot of details, and in
(01:50):
some cases we don't even have solid information, even though
she was very important, very wealthy, and written about a
lot in the paper, but we don't have a lot
of personal details. So part of this process for me
is just trying to piece together who she was based
on what information we do actually have. We've talked on
(02:11):
the show about sewing machines before. Back in twenty thirteen,
which was eons ago, we had a whole episode on
how multiple inventors in the nineteenth century were working on
the idea and also fighting over it, both legally and
sometimes physically fighting. This even ran as a Saturday Classic
(02:33):
in twenty seventeen, which is also so long ago. There
were a lot of baby steps to get to the
point where a functional sewing machine was even feasible. In
seventeen fifty five, the first sewing machine needle was patented.
This was a British patent issued to German inventor Charles Weisenthal.
(02:55):
A British inventor named Thomas Saint also started drawing out
diagram of how a sewing machine could work in the
seventeen nineties, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that
efforts really started to ramp up, and there were a
lot of failures. In the early eighteen hundreds, Some designs,
such as that of Joseph Mattersberger of Austria, which was
(03:17):
in eighteen fourteen, looked really good on paper, but they
weren't actually translatable to functioning machinery. His ideas were right,
it just like didn't all come together properly. The first
sewing machine in the US, or what sometimes called that,
was created by John Knowles and John Adams Dodge in
the late eighteen teens, and while it worked, it apparently
(03:39):
didn't work well. It tended to have a failure after
sewing just a little while, and the inventors did not
further develop it for various reasons. Finally, in eighteen thirty,
French tailor and inventor Bertelmtimonier was able to design and
produce a functioning, dependable chain stitch sewing machine, and that
(04:00):
also led to riots. When Taylor's protested it, Timonier's factory
was burnt to the ground. Timnier's ordeal caused some hesitation
among other inventors who were working on mechanizing stitching. It's
pretty understandable when Walter Hunt of Martinsburg, New York came
up with a machine, he was not in a big
(04:22):
hurry to patent it or to try to put it
into production, in part because he recognized that there would
be a disruption in the industry when and if somebody
was truly successful at implementing this kind of machine in
a factory setting. His early machine was fascinating because, unlike
others that sought to replicate the way the human hand
(04:43):
would stitch a needle and thread, he came up with
a method that used two threads to create a lock stitch,
and that was something that would be central to claims
on later patents that were issued to other inventors. Starting
in the eighteen forties, patent claims for sewing machines in
and Europe were fast and furious. There were people filing
(05:04):
patents for every single piece of the puzzle, although no
one was really putting together a whole hole machine. The
culmination of all of those patents was the huge patent
battle between Elias Howe an Isaac Singer, and the first
combination patent, which came about when a number of different
(05:24):
inventors finally agreed to group their patents under one umbrella
for mutual benefit. But and this is just the fastest overview,
all of those efforts and designs and machines were designed
to do just one thing, a straight stitch or a
chain stitch that went in a straight line. And to
talk about how additional features emerged, because a normal sewing
(05:46):
machine today, at least a home sewing machine, does a
lot of other things. Factory machines might do specialty things,
but they do a lot of other things. And to
talk about all of that, we actually first have to
talk briefly about the shipping industry in Maine at the time.
Nathaniel Blanchard, alleged to be of Huguenot descent, was a
ship merchant living and working in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in
(06:09):
the area that would later be known as Portland. There's
actually a whole other story there of town separating and reforming,
but that's really outside the scope of this episode. Blanchard
had a wife, Phoebe Buxton Blanchard, and they had five children, Louise, Augustus, Pessis, Ellen, David, Henry,
and then the youngest, Helen Augusta, born in eighteen forty.
(06:32):
Some biographies also mention another son, Albus r. Although it's
not clear where he may have fit into the chronology
of all the kids. Blanchard did very well for himself.
The family occupied one of the largest and most well
known homes in town. That was the mansion that sat
on the corner of High and Pleasant Streets. Though he
(06:53):
made a very nice fortune for himself, as the eighteen
forties played out, his businesses started to have a series
of trouble and those slowly drained his finances. The Bangor
Daily Wig and Courier ran a brief on July ninth,
eighteen fifty three that read quote the Portland Advertiser states
that a new ship ready to be planked, was burnt
(07:15):
on Thursday at Cape Elizabeth in the shipyard of mister
Thomas Knight. The fire was probably set in the workshop
and probably no insurance. That guess was correct. There was
no insurance, and that ship in question had been requisitioned
by Nathaniel Blanchard. This was a huge investment for him,
(07:35):
intended to bolster his business and regain some of his
lost footing in the area and his lost wealth. And
when the fire happened, he still needed another ship for
his company, and so he had to pay out of
pocket for construction to begin again. The second attempt was
successful in that the resulting ship, the Phoenix, was completed, launched,
(07:57):
and put into service. But he still felt that he
needed to grow his fleet, so he commissioned another ship
starting in eighteen fifty six, and that was completed the
following year. But eighteen fifty seven was a rough year
in the US Financially, the railroad industry had experienced explosive
growth up to that point. Banks had given railroad companies
(08:19):
a lot of money in the form of loans to
help keep up with the demand. But a lot of
those companies were basically startups that were trying to cash
in on the growth of a new type of business,
and a lot of them were started with little understanding
of how to actually operate. That meant that a lot
of them folded and defaulted on their loans. At the
(08:39):
same time, the Ohio Life Insurance Company, which had been
woefully mismanaged and was involved in a lot of fraudulent
transactions benefiting the company executives, they announced they would no
longer be paying out any claims. Those two things and
a number of other factors led to a financial panic
where there were a number of runs on banks. This
(09:01):
is not an environment where a shipping industry magnate really thrives,
and Blanchard was in deeper trouble than ever, and then
one of his investment properties burned to the ground in
eighteen sixty three. At that point he was in desperate
need of money, and he took out a massive loan
of fourteen thousand dollars, and then things continued to go
(09:23):
downhill from there. Phoebe died in eighteen seventy when Nathaniel
died a year later in eighteen seventy one, there was
really nothing left and we are finally going to get
into Helen's story, but first we will pause for a
sponsor break. When Nathaniel Blanchard died, his youngest child, Helen Augustus,
(09:53):
was unmarried and still living at home. We don't, as
we said at the top of the show, know a
lot about her childhood. It is one of the many
parts of her life that just isn't very well documented,
but we do know that without parental support, she had
to figure out a way to get by. Although she
is the youngest she was to be clear an adult
(10:13):
woman at this point. She was born on October twenty fifth,
eighteen forty, so she was thirty when her father died
in early eighteen seventy one, and as part of defaulting
on his loans, he had lost all of his property,
which he had put up for collaterals, so she did
not have a home anymore. So she moved away from
Maine to Boston, where she ran a boarding house. Apparently
(10:37):
this did not go particularly well, so she moved on
to factory work. This was a huge change of fortunes
considering that she had been part of one of the
wealthiest families in Maine. She was put on a line
working on a sewing machine. To keep in mind, sewing
machines had really been around only for a couple of decades,
so they were dependable, but there her functionality was a
(11:01):
huge step forward for manufacture, but still pretty basic, and
Helen apparently did not like it. Roughly fifteen years later,
on August twenty fourth, eighteen eighty six, the Portland Daily
Press detailed what happened the day Helen's frustration in her
factory job gave her an idea. Quote one day, in
(11:22):
a fit of desperation, she kicked over the sewing machine,
declaring she would not drudge along in that way any longer.
She had observed that if in gentlemen's fine underwear the
stitch was improved, the value of the goods would be
much enhanced. So Helen sought to address the limitations of
existing sewing machines, and she set to work figuring out
(11:45):
specifically what sort of mechanism might make a cleaner finish
to a cut edge. Over time, she worked out the
logistics of her idea, and eventually she had an invention.
But she didn't actually have the money to submit a
patent application. She ended up borrowing from a friend and
submitted her documents for Improvement in Sewing Machines in June
(12:07):
of eighteen seventy three. She was granted patent number one
four one nine eight seven on August nineteenth. The patent explains, quote,
the present invention relates to certain new and useful improvements
in sewing machines, having for their principal object the forming
of an over stitch that may be adapted to either
(12:28):
fine or coarse work. My improvements consist mainly of a
series of mechanical devices connected with a sewing machine, and
arranged and operated as will be here and after more
fully explained, so as to give a progressive and lateral
movement to a feed to place the material so that
the needle will descend through and then outside of the work,
(12:51):
so as to form an over or buttonhole stitch. These
improvements also consist in a device arranged and operated as
will be dually described, for varying the depth of the
stitch so as to be used for fine or coarse work,
and of a device for disconnecting the operation of my
improvements to allow the ordinary working of the machine for
(13:12):
its customary sewing. Okay, so patent language we already know,
because every time it comes upon the show can be
a little bit stilted, and if you don't sew, you
might not understand what she's talking about. And even if
you do so, the way she's talking about it is
in the language and parlance of the time, and it
may not correlate to modern sewing terms that you do know.
(13:35):
I have seen a number of instances where this first
invention is described as a buttonholer that is not correct
in the terms we would think about a buttonholer today. Rather,
it creates what she called a buttonhole stitch, but which
you would more commonly know as a zigzag today. And
the reason it's called a buttonhole stitch is because if
(13:55):
you look at a buttonhole on a modern garment, most
of them are finished with a ti zigzag edge and
what's also called a satin stitch because the stitches are
so close together. Modern buttonhole machines or on home machines,
attachments or functions manage all of the turning that you
have to do to make a buttonhole, but for a
long time, stitchers would just learn to turn the garment.
(14:17):
They were stitching manually to create a buttonhole, and so
they needed the stitch that would enable them to do that.
That's what this did. Also, the language about depth just
for clarity does not mean that it would drop down
the stitch below the fabric. In some way, it means
the width of the zigzag is adjustable the depth from
the needle to the side. This new machine was a
(14:42):
big deal and it was rapidly adopted by factories, and
Helen really quickly found herself regaining some of the wealth
that her family had lost. I think if you don't
sew the benefit of going from like one running chain
stitch and a straight line maybe curving, if you worked
(15:04):
on it as an option, going from that being the
only thing you could do to being able to do
with zigzag like that was really a big deal. It's yeah, huge,
I mean it's it can basically like catch in like
you would look at on a buttonhole. It catches in
that edge where the buttonhole is cut open for the
button to pass through, so that that piece of fabric
doesn't frey all apart and become useless. Right. Yeah, we
(15:27):
love a zigzag. Lots of uses for them, Helen's next
invention was really more of a technique, and it's described
in a patent titled Improvement in Elastic Seams for Garments,
which was issued to her in the spring of eighteen
seventy five. Quote. This stitch can be sewed on any
of the ordinary lock stitch sewing machines by a slight
(15:50):
manipulation of the tension to suit the material worked on,
and an alteration of the needless will be explained. The
stitch itself is constructed with one an elastic thread, preferably
of rubber, in combination with any ordinary thread. This arrangement
furnishes the requisite degree of elasticity to the completed stitch.
(16:11):
The rubber thread is best applied from the shuttle, in
which case a moderate tension is desirable. However, if the
rubber thread is fed by the needle, the eye of
the needle must be somewhat enlarged and made to bulge
outward towards the center to assume an elliptical form, and
the edges must be rounded to prevent the cutting of
the rubber thread while under tension. I have also used
(16:34):
a needle having a square eye with perfect success. This
method of hand winding a bobbin with elastic thread to
stitch gathered elassicized garments is still taught all the time
as assuring technique that can create faux smocking. What she
was actually patenting, as noted in the summary of the
document at the end, was as follows. Quote, I claim
(16:56):
and desire to secure by letters patent of the United States,
the elastic seam and having one thread of rubber and
the other of ordinary sewing thread. Substantially as described Basically,
if a factory implemented this technique to elasticized garments, she
was entitled to payment. Yeah, it wasn't so much an
(17:18):
item or a piece of machinery, but like I'm gonna
tell you how to do it and then you're gonna
give me money. Yeah. Uh More ways to elasticize garments
also a big deal. Yeah, I mean, as Tracy just said,
that is a technique that is still taught to home
soists so that you can create you know, gathered seams
(17:42):
that have stretched to them for your garments. And at
this point she had two patents, but she was just
getting started. Her next patent was Improvement in Elastic Goring
for Shoes, which was also issued in eighteen seventy five,
and it incorporated a variation of that elastic seeming technique
to create stretchy gores that could be inserted into shoes
(18:02):
in a way that made them more comfortable and also
able to stand up to normal wear much better. The
next was improvement in welted and covered seams, and this
was a technique like the elastic seams noting quote. My
invention relates to seams of cloth, leather, or any other
suitable material made by placing the two edges to be
(18:23):
united one over the other, and then alternately stitching within
and without the edge. Afterward flattening out the seam so
that the edges will abut, and sowing leather, cloth, and
et cetera. With this seam, where it is subject to
considerable chafing or rubbing, it is desirable often to furnish
protection to the parts of the threads exposed on the
(18:45):
wearing surface. This I do in two ways, by the
insertion of a piping or welt by sowing a strip
over the seam. The advantages of the welt or piping
and of the covered seam are manifest in the protection
which they afford against the wearing and chafing of the
exposed parts of the seam thread. They are particularly applicable
(19:08):
to these seams of shoes, leather, mittens, bags, and heavy
woolen goods or canvas. Still I do not limit them
to such. Yeah, So those are the kinds of seams
like you might see on the inside of your denim,
like on the inside seam that you don't see any
of the raw edges because they're all contained. They're very
(19:31):
strong seams, and they also, as she mentioned, are protected
a little bit from wear and tear. She also patented
a hollow needle, a spool case that kept thread from
being unwound, refinements to sewing machines, and a machine for
inserting hat bands to protect the hat from sweat. In
nineteen oh one, she submitted a patent for Improvements in
(19:53):
Seams for sewed articles or Fabrics, which states quote, consists
of an improved seam especially applicable for knitted fabrics. The
edges to be united are placed together and penetrated by
two loops of unequal length. The longer loop A, which
is the further from the edge, is then turned up
so that it and the loop B can be drawn
(20:15):
together to the edge to be enchained with a loop
c drawn over the edge from the upper side. On
the completion of the sewing, the two portions of fabric
are separated. She just described a surger. If you don't
know what that is, that's another thing you see. Surge
seems all the time in your purchase closed today. That's
(20:37):
when the raw edges on the interior usually of your
garment are bound with what looks almost like a spiral
of thread that contains the whole thing so they don't
come apart. For this invention, Helen Blanchard will forever have
my heart. I feel like for a lot of people
who want to sew, step one sewing machine and often
(21:01):
the next big purchase for people who are really doing
a lot of garment sewing, it's going to be a surger. Yeah,
it's It's one of those things that really like separates
the appearance of your finished garment from like looking like
I made this myself to looking like a professionally made
piece of clothing. Because the finish is so clean, it's
(21:26):
a lot better. There are a lot of other ways
you can do a clean finish that like tailors would
use and stuff, but in terms of your home sewing, right,
I said better, And I want to say I'm casting
no aspersions on anybody that's sewing their seams and pressing
them and doing all the finishing that way. That's like,
that's also no. And there's also right, Like you can
do like a bound seam where you actually then after
(21:49):
you've stitched it, you enclosed the raw edges with another
strip of fabric. Like. There are lots of other ways.
But in terms of like a fast accessible we could
talk them behind the scenes about threading these mische It's
a whole other party. This is a big deal in
terms of the development of sewing. Yeah. Over the course
of forty one years, Helen patented twenty eight inventions. Almost
(22:13):
all of them were for sewing machines and methods, and
those were all intended for factory use. One big exception
was an eighteen ninety four invention of a surgical needle
that patent reads quote this invention has for its object
to provide a surgical needle adapted to introduce the thread
or wire into the human skin with the minimum degree
(22:33):
of pain to the patient. The invention consists in a
surgical needle comprising a lancet point and a blade having
a notch, the rear side of which is formed to
engage a thread when the needle is being inserted, while
the forward side is formed to release the thread when
the needle is being withdrawn. So while this is a
surgical item, you can tell that the inspiration for its
(22:56):
function comes from her work with needles in the sewing
world world, and of her twenty eight inventions, a whopping
twenty two of them were adopted into regular use in
factory settings shortly after their introduction. It is really not
an overstatement to say she steered the course of industrial
sewing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. And
(23:18):
coming up, we'll talk a little bit more about Helen's
relationships with her siblings and her family and community, But
first we will take a break to hear from the
sponsors that keep the show going. In the beginning of
(23:38):
the eighteen eighties, Helen extended her regained financial stability to
her oldest sister, Louise, who was also unmarried, by moving
to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Louise already lived, and going into
business with her. They formed the Blanchard Oversea Machine Company.
Louise was definitely not the only family member that Helen assisted.
(24:01):
For example, in nineteen hundred, the Boston Evening Transcript reported
that the Blanchard Lumber Company had been founded in Portland, Maine,
quote with a capital stock of seventy five thousand dollars.
Helen was listed as the president of that company, and
an HW Blanchard was the treasurer. I was not able
to figure out who specifically HW. Blanchard was. I was
(24:24):
tracing what I could of her family line, but did
not find an HW. But the likely thing is that
it was either like a niece or a nephew, or
possibly a cousin or something like that. There are also
mentions in various newspaper accounts written during Helen's lifetime that
note that she helped out her family members, although specifics
on that help can be a little bit tricky to pinpoint.
(24:47):
It would probably be possible to scour newspaper mentions of
her name to find other business announcements, but she was
written about a lot and a lot of it is
just these really brief, standard BIS business notices of the day,
like when property changed hands or when a company opened.
So I will admit sifting through that seemed pretty whelming
(25:07):
to me and I did not track all of them down.
In the eighteen nineties, Blanchard expanded her base of operations
to also include living in New York at least part
of the time. Holly was not able to find primary
sources for any of what's coming up, but it did
come up in a few different places. As she reached
her fifties, she also became a philanthropist. She funded several
(25:32):
programs that were focused on helping women who were experiencing
financial hardship. She recognized that her inventions were shifting the
job market and potentially decreasing opportunities for women, so she
paid special attention to causes that were related to the
negative impacts of industrialization. As an example of the places
(25:53):
and ways that information pops up, it appeared as follows
in the eighteen ninety three book A Woman of the Senate,
which was an encyclopedia of noteworthy women compiled by Francis
Elizabeth Willard. Quote, in all the rush and publicity that
have surrounded her, she has preserved those qualities of gentleness, dignity,
(26:13):
and modesty which adorn her character and secure her a
grateful welcome into the social life of the metropolis. Aiding
with open hearted generosity the meritorious efforts of struggling women
wherever she has found them. She has distinguished herself as
a benefactor of her sex. Yeah, so there are lots
of allusions made to her helping out women's organizations, but
(26:37):
no specific organizations ever seem to get named, So just
keep that in mind. But while she was living in
Pennsylvania and New York, Helen also found her way back
to Maine. The eighteen eighty six newspaper report that we
mentioned earlier actually did a story on this, writing that
she quote has been enabled not only to enjoy the
(26:58):
luxuries of life herself health, but afford them to her family.
Miss Blanchard, however, was not satisfied that the old family
property should remain in the hands of strangers. She has
been visiting the vicinity of Portland lately, and she has
placed in the hands of her attorney, mister George M. Cedars,
the authority to repurchase the old mansion and the stores,
(27:20):
which will be placed in the same condition they enjoyed
when the family was at the best estate. Helen did
successfully buy back the family home and her father's other
various properties around town as well, as investing in a
number of other properties, and so she also started just
spending her summers in Maine, and she was welcomed back.
(27:40):
In eighteen ninety nine, a note appeared in the Portland
Sunday Telegram reading quote Miss Helen A. B. B. Lanchard writes,
a well known woman of Portland is one whose name
should find a place in Possibly About You, that was
a series in the paper about notable locals. She is
one of the few women inventors. Her inventive genius and
(28:02):
business capacity, her tireless industry and good judgment have enabled
her to render services to the country of which her
native city may well be proud. Though for some years
she has made her home in Philadelphia, where her business
interests have largely been placed, and in New York, she
turns her face Portland ward every summer. She is well
(28:23):
remembered by those who survive of her classmates in the
famous Young Women's Seminary kept for so many years by
Dean Packard on Free Street. Helen's multi city life makes
her a little bit hard to track sometimes because it
seems that she sometimes just opted to live with siblings
or other relatives rather than purchasing or renting a new
(28:43):
place sometimes, and there's not always a clear address or
an appearance in city directories for her. What we know
regarding her city of residence at any given time is
largely just extrapolated from the information that she gave on
patent applications. In nineteen hundred, Helen was involved in a
legal tangle, and we'll tell you up front, we do
(29:05):
not know exactly how it was resolved, but it was
reported in the Portland Daily Press on December twenty second
that Helen was being sued. The plaintiff, Charles A. Jordan,
was a furniture salesman who had two promissory notes for
the sale of furniture totaling one hundred and thirty two
dollars and sixty five cents. One had been paid and
(29:27):
the other had not, but there was also a note
handwritten on each of them that said with interest. Blanchard
claimed that the interest note had been added after she
had signed these notes, but the one she paid nothing on,
she claimed was past the statute of limitations. Yeah, that's
(29:47):
about all the information we have on that. And as
I was reading the article, I was like, did she
not pay this bill? And then she just waited it out,
and then she was like done, it's too old. I'm
not going to deal with that. This was not her
only legal case that month, although in the other case
that I found she was the plaintiff. The very next
day after that promissory note story ran, the Philadelphia Inquirer
(30:11):
ran a short item stating that Blanchard had quote filed
a bill in equity in United States Circuit Court against
John Bigelow of Minneapolis, Minnesota and James Greenwood of Boston, Massachusetts,
individually and as trustees, asking that a certain trust agreement
be canceled and that certain royalties payable from the Wilcox
(30:31):
and Gibbs Sewing Machine Company be paid to her. So,
while we don't have a lot of information on that one,
it does indicate pretty clearly that she was not hesitant
when it came to defending her business interests legally. Although
she was really often described in very positive terms in
the press of Portland, Holly did find an instance where
(30:51):
she was fully put on blast in the paper by
a storage company she had neglected to pay. This notice
appeared in the Poorland Sunday Telegram on January thirty first,
nineteen fifteen, quote no auction sale. The auction sale advertised
to be held at the Crocker Storage Warehouse at three
forty Cumberland Avenue on Monday, February first, at nine o'clock
(31:14):
am of the household furniture and effects of one Helen A.
Blanchard for non payment of storage charges has been indefinitely postponed.
Parties interested in said furniture and effects have made a
satisfactory settlement with the administrators of the Portland Storage Warehouse Company.
But the thing is we can't actually jump to conclusions
(31:37):
about that one. The nineteen teens played out really poorly
for the surviving Blanchard family, and specifically for Helen. In
nineteen fourteen, her sister Louise, with whom she was very
close and had a business, died, and in the months
that followed, her sister Pursis also died, and then all
three of the Blanchard brothers died, one right after the other.
(32:00):
She lost her entire group of siblings in the course
of one year, so that non payment situation with the
storage company happened while she was grieving, possibly working to
settle her sibling's estates. Indeed, her obituary that came out
several years later would note quote loss of two sisters
and three brothers in nineteen fourteen brought about prostration from
(32:23):
which she never fully recovered. And then in nineteen sixteen
Helen had a stroke which left her unable to work,
and it seems that after that she likely lived with
her niece Louise Merrill, who resided in Providence, Rhode Island.
Helen died in Providence on January twelfth, nineteen twenty two,
at the age of eighty one. But her death leaves
(32:45):
yet another question mark, which is what happened to Oliver
money and nobody seems to know, As noted by Autumn
Stanley in the nineteen ninety five book Mothers and Daughters
of Invention quote, all indications are that Helen Blanchard was
tremendously wealthy, yet no will was probated for her estate,
either in Providence or in Portland. Perhaps after her stroke
(33:07):
of nineteen sixteen, she was declared incompetent in her estate
apportioned at that time among surviving nieces and nephews, including
Louise Merrill of Providence. This is just one of the
many mysteries awaiting further research. Yeah, we do not know
where any of those holdings went, but what we do
know is that Helen was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery
(33:27):
in Portland, Maine, with the rest of her family, and
in two thousand and six, Helen Blanchard was inducted into
the National Inventors Hall of Fame. I feel personal gratitude
for her, but that is Helen Blanchard who will wax
her raapsotic about maybe or just sewing in general. Sorry,
if you don't care to hear sowing, how you're getting
(33:47):
in this week on Friday? And since it's on theme,
I have listener mail great that is also about sewing.
This is from our listener, Alyssa, who writes High Ladies.
I discovered your podcast during COVID Lockdowns and I've been
a listener ever since. You were talking on the behind
(34:10):
the scenes about how hundreds of factories could fit in
a small town, and I wanted to share a favorite
New York City experience for listeners who live in or
visit the city. In the Garment District, there are still
several small factories hand making goods for the fashion and
entertainment industries, and the public can sometimes tour and also
purchase from them. I have gotten to visit both M
(34:31):
and S Schmahlberg Custom Fabricflowers dot com and Wing and
Weft Glove Factory, which is we Glove you dot com,
and I couldn't recommend them more. You can bring them
special fabrics and they can make the flowers or gloves
for you, or you can choose from what they have made.
They can walk you through the process as it's been
done for more than one hundred years. The factories are
about as large as one story of a modest size house,
(34:53):
so it's easy to imagine quite a few existing in
just one building. I do not have any fur babies,
as I have terrible allergies, but I do have two kids,
both of whom love going to New York. So I'm
attaching a pick of my twelve year old daughter from
our girls' trip this past summer at the Museum of Broadway,
which was so much fun to visit. Thank you for
teaching and entertaining us, and I hope some of your
listeners are able to support these small and super cool businesses. Alyssa,
(35:18):
this is a very cool story. I didn't know you
could visit and tour those You would think that would
be a thing I would know. Yeah, now I have
more stuff on my list to do when I'm in
New York. It kind of reminds me of an alternate
version of when there are like gallery walk days and
studio strolls and things like that where you can like
tour all of the artists' studios in an area. Love it,
(35:41):
love it. Yes, go do that. Support businesses like that
if you can, because those sound amazing and I want
them to stay around so we can all visit. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you
would like to subscribe to the podcast and you have
not gotten around to that, I promise you it's the
easiest thing in the world. You can do that on
(36:01):
the iHeartRadio app, or really anywhere you listen to your
favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Yon
Mattzaliger not that long ago, and my apologies because we
have another inventory. I think that's fine, and specifically one
(00:24):
that works in apparel. This is also just a time
of year where I am, I don't know why, hyper
focused on sewing. This seems totally reasonable to me. I
think part of it is that, like there's a little
bit of time off, so I have a little more
time to sew. But also it's like, as we all know,
(00:46):
I love a plan and a calendar, and I can
like plan out my projects for the next year, and
I'm in that mindset. So that's what's going on. And
of course that means that I'm reading a lot of
sewing information and I'm always casting about for interesting stuff
about stitching, and then I run across fun things and
then I'm like, ooh, I should talk about that on
a show. If you are a stitcher or if you
(01:07):
just like a person that likes to follow sewing accounts
on social media, those exist. They're very soothing, but you
will often you know, there are a lot of accounts
that are wonderful that will show all kinds of tutorials
for various techniques or tools that will improve your sewing.
And the thing is, a lot of those techniques trace
back to one woman who was kind of using her
(01:30):
ingenuity at the time to survive. But she's the person
who developed a lot of them, although for the industrial space,
not really the homesowist. So we're going to talk about
her today because she is Helen A Blanchard, but there
are a lot of aspects to her story that are
really lacking. There are just big chunks of her life
where we don't have a lot of details, and in
(01:50):
some cases we don't even have solid information, even though
she was very important, very wealthy, and written about a
lot in the paper, but we don't have a lot
of personal details. So part of this process for me
is just trying to piece together who she was based
on what information we do actually have. We've talked on
(02:11):
the show about sewing machines before. Back in twenty thirteen,
which was eons ago, we had a whole episode on
how multiple inventors in the nineteenth century were working on
the idea and also fighting over it, both legally and
sometimes physically fighting. This even ran as a Saturday Classic
(02:33):
in twenty seventeen, which is also so long ago. There
were a lot of baby steps to get to the
point where a functional sewing machine was even feasible. In
seventeen fifty five, the first sewing machine needle was patented.
This was a British patent issued to German inventor Charles Weisenthal.
(02:55):
A British inventor named Thomas Saint also started drawing out
diagram of how a sewing machine could work in the
seventeen nineties, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that
efforts really started to ramp up, and there were a
lot of failures. In the early eighteen hundreds, Some designs,
such as that of Joseph Mattersberger of Austria, which was
(03:17):
in eighteen fourteen, looked really good on paper, but they
weren't actually translatable to functioning machinery. His ideas were right,
it just like didn't all come together properly. The first
sewing machine in the US, or what sometimes called that,
was created by John Knowles and John Adams Dodge in
the late eighteen teens, and while it worked, it apparently
(03:39):
didn't work well. It tended to have a failure after
sewing just a little while, and the inventors did not
further develop it for various reasons. Finally, in eighteen thirty,
French tailor and inventor Bertelmtimonier was able to design and
produce a functioning, dependable chain stitch sewing machine, and that
(04:00):
also led to riots. When Taylor's protested it, Timonier's factory
was burnt to the ground. Timnier's ordeal caused some hesitation
among other inventors who were working on mechanizing stitching. It's
pretty understandable when Walter Hunt of Martinsburg, New York came
up with a machine, he was not in a big
(04:22):
hurry to patent it or to try to put it
into production, in part because he recognized that there would
be a disruption in the industry when and if somebody
was truly successful at implementing this kind of machine in
a factory setting. His early machine was fascinating because, unlike
others that sought to replicate the way the human hand
(04:43):
would stitch a needle and thread, he came up with
a method that used two threads to create a lock stitch,
and that was something that would be central to claims
on later patents that were issued to other inventors. Starting
in the eighteen forties, patent claims for sewing machines in
and Europe were fast and furious. There were people filing
(05:04):
patents for every single piece of the puzzle, although no
one was really putting together a whole hole machine. The
culmination of all of those patents was the huge patent
battle between Elias Howe an Isaac Singer, and the first
combination patent, which came about when a number of different
(05:24):
inventors finally agreed to group their patents under one umbrella
for mutual benefit. But and this is just the fastest overview,
all of those efforts and designs and machines were designed
to do just one thing, a straight stitch or a
chain stitch that went in a straight line. And to
talk about how additional features emerged, because a normal sewing
(05:46):
machine today, at least a home sewing machine, does a
lot of other things. Factory machines might do specialty things,
but they do a lot of other things. And to
talk about all of that, we actually first have to
talk briefly about the shipping industry in Maine at the time.
Nathaniel Blanchard, alleged to be of Huguenot descent, was a
ship merchant living and working in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in
(06:09):
the area that would later be known as Portland. There's
actually a whole other story there of town separating and reforming,
but that's really outside the scope of this episode. Blanchard
had a wife, Phoebe Buxton Blanchard, and they had five children, Louise, Augustus, Pessis, Ellen, David, Henry,
and then the youngest, Helen Augusta, born in eighteen forty.
(06:32):
Some biographies also mention another son, Albus r. Although it's
not clear where he may have fit into the chronology
of all the kids. Blanchard did very well for himself.
The family occupied one of the largest and most well
known homes in town. That was the mansion that sat
on the corner of High and Pleasant Streets. Though he
(06:53):
made a very nice fortune for himself, as the eighteen
forties played out, his businesses started to have a series
of trouble and those slowly drained his finances. The Bangor
Daily Wig and Courier ran a brief on July ninth,
eighteen fifty three that read quote the Portland Advertiser states
that a new ship ready to be planked, was burnt
(07:15):
on Thursday at Cape Elizabeth in the shipyard of mister
Thomas Knight. The fire was probably set in the workshop
and probably no insurance. That guess was correct. There was
no insurance, and that ship in question had been requisitioned
by Nathaniel Blanchard. This was a huge investment for him,
(07:35):
intended to bolster his business and regain some of his
lost footing in the area and his lost wealth. And
when the fire happened, he still needed another ship for
his company, and so he had to pay out of
pocket for construction to begin again. The second attempt was
successful in that the resulting ship, the Phoenix, was completed, launched,
(07:57):
and put into service. But he still felt that he
needed to grow his fleet, so he commissioned another ship
starting in eighteen fifty six, and that was completed the
following year. But eighteen fifty seven was a rough year
in the US Financially, the railroad industry had experienced explosive
growth up to that point. Banks had given railroad companies
(08:19):
a lot of money in the form of loans to
help keep up with the demand. But a lot of
those companies were basically startups that were trying to cash
in on the growth of a new type of business,
and a lot of them were started with little understanding
of how to actually operate. That meant that a lot
of them folded and defaulted on their loans. At the
(08:39):
same time, the Ohio Life Insurance Company, which had been
woefully mismanaged and was involved in a lot of fraudulent
transactions benefiting the company executives, they announced they would no
longer be paying out any claims. Those two things and
a number of other factors led to a financial panic
where there were a number of runs on banks. This
(09:01):
is not an environment where a shipping industry magnate really thrives,
and Blanchard was in deeper trouble than ever, and then
one of his investment properties burned to the ground in
eighteen sixty three. At that point he was in desperate
need of money, and he took out a massive loan
of fourteen thousand dollars, and then things continued to go
(09:23):
downhill from there. Phoebe died in eighteen seventy when Nathaniel
died a year later in eighteen seventy one, there was
really nothing left and we are finally going to get
into Helen's story, but first we will pause for a
sponsor break. When Nathaniel Blanchard died, his youngest child, Helen Augustus,
(09:53):
was unmarried and still living at home. We don't, as
we said at the top of the show, know a
lot about her childhood. It is one of the many
parts of her life that just isn't very well documented,
but we do know that without parental support, she had
to figure out a way to get by. Although she
is the youngest she was to be clear an adult
(10:13):
woman at this point. She was born on October twenty fifth,
eighteen forty, so she was thirty when her father died
in early eighteen seventy one, and as part of defaulting
on his loans, he had lost all of his property,
which he had put up for collaterals, so she did
not have a home anymore. So she moved away from
Maine to Boston, where she ran a boarding house. Apparently
(10:37):
this did not go particularly well, so she moved on
to factory work. This was a huge change of fortunes
considering that she had been part of one of the
wealthiest families in Maine. She was put on a line
working on a sewing machine. To keep in mind, sewing
machines had really been around only for a couple of decades,
so they were dependable, but there her functionality was a
(11:01):
huge step forward for manufacture, but still pretty basic, and
Helen apparently did not like it. Roughly fifteen years later,
on August twenty fourth, eighteen eighty six, the Portland Daily
Press detailed what happened the day Helen's frustration in her
factory job gave her an idea. Quote one day, in
(11:22):
a fit of desperation, she kicked over the sewing machine,
declaring she would not drudge along in that way any longer.
She had observed that if in gentlemen's fine underwear the
stitch was improved, the value of the goods would be
much enhanced. So Helen sought to address the limitations of
existing sewing machines, and she set to work figuring out
(11:45):
specifically what sort of mechanism might make a cleaner finish
to a cut edge. Over time, she worked out the
logistics of her idea, and eventually she had an invention.
But she didn't actually have the money to submit a
patent application. She ended up borrowing from a friend and
submitted her documents for Improvement in Sewing Machines in June
(12:07):
of eighteen seventy three. She was granted patent number one
four one nine eight seven on August nineteenth. The patent explains, quote,
the present invention relates to certain new and useful improvements
in sewing machines, having for their principal object the forming
of an over stitch that may be adapted to either
(12:28):
fine or coarse work. My improvements consist mainly of a
series of mechanical devices connected with a sewing machine, and
arranged and operated as will be here and after more
fully explained, so as to give a progressive and lateral
movement to a feed to place the material so that
the needle will descend through and then outside of the work,
(12:51):
so as to form an over or buttonhole stitch. These
improvements also consist in a device arranged and operated as
will be dually described, for varying the depth of the
stitch so as to be used for fine or coarse work,
and of a device for disconnecting the operation of my
improvements to allow the ordinary working of the machine for
(13:12):
its customary sewing. Okay, so patent language we already know,
because every time it comes upon the show can be
a little bit stilted, and if you don't sew, you
might not understand what she's talking about. And even if
you do so, the way she's talking about it is
in the language and parlance of the time, and it
may not correlate to modern sewing terms that you do know.
(13:35):
I have seen a number of instances where this first
invention is described as a buttonholer that is not correct
in the terms we would think about a buttonholer today. Rather,
it creates what she called a buttonhole stitch, but which
you would more commonly know as a zigzag today. And
the reason it's called a buttonhole stitch is because if
(13:55):
you look at a buttonhole on a modern garment, most
of them are finished with a ti zigzag edge and
what's also called a satin stitch because the stitches are
so close together. Modern buttonhole machines or on home machines,
attachments or functions manage all of the turning that you
have to do to make a buttonhole, but for a
long time, stitchers would just learn to turn the garment.
(14:17):
They were stitching manually to create a buttonhole, and so
they needed the stitch that would enable them to do that.
That's what this did. Also, the language about depth just
for clarity does not mean that it would drop down
the stitch below the fabric. In some way, it means
the width of the zigzag is adjustable the depth from
the needle to the side. This new machine was a
(14:42):
big deal and it was rapidly adopted by factories, and
Helen really quickly found herself regaining some of the wealth
that her family had lost. I think if you don't
sew the benefit of going from like one running chain
stitch and a straight line maybe curving, if you worked
(15:04):
on it as an option, going from that being the
only thing you could do to being able to do
with zigzag like that was really a big deal. It's yeah, huge,
I mean it's it can basically like catch in like
you would look at on a buttonhole. It catches in
that edge where the buttonhole is cut open for the
button to pass through, so that that piece of fabric
doesn't frey all apart and become useless. Right. Yeah, we
(15:27):
love a zigzag. Lots of uses for them, Helen's next
invention was really more of a technique, and it's described
in a patent titled Improvement in Elastic Seams for Garments,
which was issued to her in the spring of eighteen
seventy five. Quote. This stitch can be sewed on any
of the ordinary lock stitch sewing machines by a slight
(15:50):
manipulation of the tension to suit the material worked on,
and an alteration of the needless will be explained. The
stitch itself is constructed with one an elastic thread, preferably
of rubber, in combination with any ordinary thread. This arrangement
furnishes the requisite degree of elasticity to the completed stitch.
(16:11):
The rubber thread is best applied from the shuttle, in
which case a moderate tension is desirable. However, if the
rubber thread is fed by the needle, the eye of
the needle must be somewhat enlarged and made to bulge
outward towards the center to assume an elliptical form, and
the edges must be rounded to prevent the cutting of
the rubber thread while under tension. I have also used
(16:34):
a needle having a square eye with perfect success. This
method of hand winding a bobbin with elastic thread to
stitch gathered elassicized garments is still taught all the time
as assuring technique that can create faux smocking. What she
was actually patenting, as noted in the summary of the
document at the end, was as follows. Quote, I claim
(16:56):
and desire to secure by letters patent of the United States,
the elastic seam and having one thread of rubber and
the other of ordinary sewing thread. Substantially as described Basically,
if a factory implemented this technique to elasticized garments, she
was entitled to payment. Yeah, it wasn't so much an
(17:18):
item or a piece of machinery, but like I'm gonna
tell you how to do it and then you're gonna
give me money. Yeah. Uh More ways to elasticize garments
also a big deal. Yeah, I mean, as Tracy just said,
that is a technique that is still taught to home
soists so that you can create you know, gathered seams
(17:42):
that have stretched to them for your garments. And at
this point she had two patents, but she was just
getting started. Her next patent was Improvement in Elastic Goring
for Shoes, which was also issued in eighteen seventy five,
and it incorporated a variation of that elastic seeming technique
to create stretchy gores that could be inserted into shoes
(18:02):
in a way that made them more comfortable and also
able to stand up to normal wear much better. The
next was improvement in welted and covered seams, and this
was a technique like the elastic seams noting quote. My
invention relates to seams of cloth, leather, or any other
suitable material made by placing the two edges to be
(18:23):
united one over the other, and then alternately stitching within
and without the edge. Afterward flattening out the seam so
that the edges will abut, and sowing leather, cloth, and
et cetera. With this seam, where it is subject to
considerable chafing or rubbing, it is desirable often to furnish
protection to the parts of the threads exposed on the
(18:45):
wearing surface. This I do in two ways, by the
insertion of a piping or welt by sowing a strip
over the seam. The advantages of the welt or piping
and of the covered seam are manifest in the protection
which they afford against the wearing and chafing of the
exposed parts of the seam thread. They are particularly applicable
(19:08):
to these seams of shoes, leather, mittens, bags, and heavy
woolen goods or canvas. Still I do not limit them
to such. Yeah, So those are the kinds of seams
like you might see on the inside of your denim,
like on the inside seam that you don't see any
of the raw edges because they're all contained. They're very
(19:31):
strong seams, and they also, as she mentioned, are protected
a little bit from wear and tear. She also patented
a hollow needle, a spool case that kept thread from
being unwound, refinements to sewing machines, and a machine for
inserting hat bands to protect the hat from sweat. In
nineteen oh one, she submitted a patent for Improvements in
(19:53):
Seams for sewed articles or Fabrics, which states quote, consists
of an improved seam especially applicable for knitted fabrics. The
edges to be united are placed together and penetrated by
two loops of unequal length. The longer loop A, which
is the further from the edge, is then turned up
so that it and the loop B can be drawn
(20:15):
together to the edge to be enchained with a loop
c drawn over the edge from the upper side. On
the completion of the sewing, the two portions of fabric
are separated. She just described a surger. If you don't
know what that is, that's another thing you see. Surge
seems all the time in your purchase closed today. That's
(20:37):
when the raw edges on the interior usually of your
garment are bound with what looks almost like a spiral
of thread that contains the whole thing so they don't
come apart. For this invention, Helen Blanchard will forever have
my heart. I feel like for a lot of people
who want to sew, step one sewing machine and often
(21:01):
the next big purchase for people who are really doing
a lot of garment sewing, it's going to be a surger. Yeah,
it's It's one of those things that really like separates
the appearance of your finished garment from like looking like
I made this myself to looking like a professionally made
piece of clothing. Because the finish is so clean, it's
(21:26):
a lot better. There are a lot of other ways
you can do a clean finish that like tailors would
use and stuff, but in terms of your home sewing, right,
I said better, And I want to say I'm casting
no aspersions on anybody that's sewing their seams and pressing
them and doing all the finishing that way. That's like,
that's also no. And there's also right, Like you can
do like a bound seam where you actually then after
(21:49):
you've stitched it, you enclosed the raw edges with another
strip of fabric. Like. There are lots of other ways.
But in terms of like a fast accessible we could
talk them behind the scenes about threading these mische It's
a whole other party. This is a big deal in
terms of the development of sewing. Yeah. Over the course
of forty one years, Helen patented twenty eight inventions. Almost
(22:13):
all of them were for sewing machines and methods, and
those were all intended for factory use. One big exception
was an eighteen ninety four invention of a surgical needle
that patent reads quote this invention has for its object
to provide a surgical needle adapted to introduce the thread
or wire into the human skin with the minimum degree
(22:33):
of pain to the patient. The invention consists in a
surgical needle comprising a lancet point and a blade having
a notch, the rear side of which is formed to
engage a thread when the needle is being inserted, while
the forward side is formed to release the thread when
the needle is being withdrawn. So while this is a
surgical item, you can tell that the inspiration for its
(22:56):
function comes from her work with needles in the sewing
world world, and of her twenty eight inventions, a whopping
twenty two of them were adopted into regular use in
factory settings shortly after their introduction. It is really not
an overstatement to say she steered the course of industrial
sewing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. And
(23:18):
coming up, we'll talk a little bit more about Helen's
relationships with her siblings and her family and community, But
first we will take a break to hear from the
sponsors that keep the show going. In the beginning of
(23:38):
the eighteen eighties, Helen extended her regained financial stability to
her oldest sister, Louise, who was also unmarried, by moving
to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Louise already lived, and going into
business with her. They formed the Blanchard Oversea Machine Company.
Louise was definitely not the only family member that Helen assisted.
(24:01):
For example, in nineteen hundred, the Boston Evening Transcript reported
that the Blanchard Lumber Company had been founded in Portland, Maine,
quote with a capital stock of seventy five thousand dollars.
Helen was listed as the president of that company, and
an HW Blanchard was the treasurer. I was not able
to figure out who specifically HW. Blanchard was. I was
(24:24):
tracing what I could of her family line, but did
not find an HW. But the likely thing is that
it was either like a niece or a nephew, or
possibly a cousin or something like that. There are also
mentions in various newspaper accounts written during Helen's lifetime that
note that she helped out her family members, although specifics
on that help can be a little bit tricky to pinpoint.
(24:47):
It would probably be possible to scour newspaper mentions of
her name to find other business announcements, but she was
written about a lot and a lot of it is
just these really brief, standard BIS business notices of the day,
like when property changed hands or when a company opened.
So I will admit sifting through that seemed pretty whelming
(25:07):
to me and I did not track all of them down.
In the eighteen nineties, Blanchard expanded her base of operations
to also include living in New York at least part
of the time. Holly was not able to find primary
sources for any of what's coming up, but it did
come up in a few different places. As she reached
her fifties, she also became a philanthropist. She funded several
(25:32):
programs that were focused on helping women who were experiencing
financial hardship. She recognized that her inventions were shifting the
job market and potentially decreasing opportunities for women, so she
paid special attention to causes that were related to the
negative impacts of industrialization. As an example of the places
(25:53):
and ways that information pops up, it appeared as follows
in the eighteen ninety three book A Woman of the Senate,
which was an encyclopedia of noteworthy women compiled by Francis
Elizabeth Willard. Quote, in all the rush and publicity that
have surrounded her, she has preserved those qualities of gentleness, dignity,
(26:13):
and modesty which adorn her character and secure her a
grateful welcome into the social life of the metropolis. Aiding
with open hearted generosity the meritorious efforts of struggling women
wherever she has found them. She has distinguished herself as
a benefactor of her sex. Yeah, so there are lots
of allusions made to her helping out women's organizations, but
(26:37):
no specific organizations ever seem to get named, So just
keep that in mind. But while she was living in
Pennsylvania and New York, Helen also found her way back
to Maine. The eighteen eighty six newspaper report that we
mentioned earlier actually did a story on this, writing that
she quote has been enabled not only to enjoy the
(26:58):
luxuries of life herself health, but afford them to her family.
Miss Blanchard, however, was not satisfied that the old family
property should remain in the hands of strangers. She has
been visiting the vicinity of Portland lately, and she has
placed in the hands of her attorney, mister George M. Cedars,
the authority to repurchase the old mansion and the stores,
(27:20):
which will be placed in the same condition they enjoyed
when the family was at the best estate. Helen did
successfully buy back the family home and her father's other
various properties around town as well, as investing in a
number of other properties, and so she also started just
spending her summers in Maine, and she was welcomed back.
(27:40):
In eighteen ninety nine, a note appeared in the Portland
Sunday Telegram reading quote Miss Helen A. B. B. Lanchard writes,
a well known woman of Portland is one whose name
should find a place in Possibly About You, that was
a series in the paper about notable locals. She is
one of the few women inventors. Her inventive genius and
(28:02):
business capacity, her tireless industry and good judgment have enabled
her to render services to the country of which her
native city may well be proud. Though for some years
she has made her home in Philadelphia, where her business
interests have largely been placed, and in New York, she
turns her face Portland ward every summer. She is well
(28:23):
remembered by those who survive of her classmates in the
famous Young Women's Seminary kept for so many years by
Dean Packard on Free Street. Helen's multi city life makes
her a little bit hard to track sometimes because it
seems that she sometimes just opted to live with siblings
or other relatives rather than purchasing or renting a new
(28:43):
place sometimes, and there's not always a clear address or
an appearance in city directories for her. What we know
regarding her city of residence at any given time is
largely just extrapolated from the information that she gave on
patent applications. In nineteen hundred, Helen was involved in a
legal tangle, and we'll tell you up front, we do
(29:05):
not know exactly how it was resolved, but it was
reported in the Portland Daily Press on December twenty second
that Helen was being sued. The plaintiff, Charles A. Jordan,
was a furniture salesman who had two promissory notes for
the sale of furniture totaling one hundred and thirty two
dollars and sixty five cents. One had been paid and
(29:27):
the other had not, but there was also a note
handwritten on each of them that said with interest. Blanchard
claimed that the interest note had been added after she
had signed these notes, but the one she paid nothing on,
she claimed was past the statute of limitations. Yeah, that's
(29:47):
about all the information we have on that. And as
I was reading the article, I was like, did she
not pay this bill? And then she just waited it out,
and then she was like done, it's too old. I'm
not going to deal with that. This was not her
only legal case that month, although in the other case
that I found she was the plaintiff. The very next
day after that promissory note story ran, the Philadelphia Inquirer
(30:11):
ran a short item stating that Blanchard had quote filed
a bill in equity in United States Circuit Court against
John Bigelow of Minneapolis, Minnesota and James Greenwood of Boston, Massachusetts,
individually and as trustees, asking that a certain trust agreement
be canceled and that certain royalties payable from the Wilcox
(30:31):
and Gibbs Sewing Machine Company be paid to her. So,
while we don't have a lot of information on that one,
it does indicate pretty clearly that she was not hesitant
when it came to defending her business interests legally. Although
she was really often described in very positive terms in
the press of Portland, Holly did find an instance where
(30:51):
she was fully put on blast in the paper by
a storage company she had neglected to pay. This notice
appeared in the Poorland Sunday Telegram on January thirty first,
nineteen fifteen, quote no auction sale. The auction sale advertised
to be held at the Crocker Storage Warehouse at three
forty Cumberland Avenue on Monday, February first, at nine o'clock
(31:14):
am of the household furniture and effects of one Helen A.
Blanchard for non payment of storage charges has been indefinitely postponed.
Parties interested in said furniture and effects have made a
satisfactory settlement with the administrators of the Portland Storage Warehouse Company.
But the thing is we can't actually jump to conclusions
(31:37):
about that one. The nineteen teens played out really poorly
for the surviving Blanchard family, and specifically for Helen. In
nineteen fourteen, her sister Louise, with whom she was very
close and had a business, died, and in the months
that followed, her sister Pursis also died, and then all
three of the Blanchard brothers died, one right after the other.
(32:00):
She lost her entire group of siblings in the course
of one year, so that non payment situation with the
storage company happened while she was grieving, possibly working to
settle her sibling's estates. Indeed, her obituary that came out
several years later would note quote loss of two sisters
and three brothers in nineteen fourteen brought about prostration from
(32:23):
which she never fully recovered. And then in nineteen sixteen
Helen had a stroke which left her unable to work,
and it seems that after that she likely lived with
her niece Louise Merrill, who resided in Providence, Rhode Island.
Helen died in Providence on January twelfth, nineteen twenty two,
at the age of eighty one. But her death leaves
(32:45):
yet another question mark, which is what happened to Oliver
money and nobody seems to know, As noted by Autumn
Stanley in the nineteen ninety five book Mothers and Daughters
of Invention quote, all indications are that Helen Blanchard was
tremendously wealthy, yet no will was probated for her estate,
either in Providence or in Portland. Perhaps after her stroke
(33:07):
of nineteen sixteen, she was declared incompetent in her estate
apportioned at that time among surviving nieces and nephews, including
Louise Merrill of Providence. This is just one of the
many mysteries awaiting further research. Yeah, we do not know
where any of those holdings went, but what we do
know is that Helen was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery
(33:27):
in Portland, Maine, with the rest of her family, and
in two thousand and six, Helen Blanchard was inducted into
the National Inventors Hall of Fame. I feel personal gratitude
for her, but that is Helen Blanchard who will wax
her raapsotic about maybe or just sewing in general. Sorry,
if you don't care to hear sowing, how you're getting
(33:47):
in this week on Friday? And since it's on theme,
I have listener mail great that is also about sewing.
This is from our listener, Alyssa, who writes High Ladies.
I discovered your podcast during COVID Lockdowns and I've been
a listener ever since. You were talking on the behind
(34:10):
the scenes about how hundreds of factories could fit in
a small town, and I wanted to share a favorite
New York City experience for listeners who live in or
visit the city. In the Garment District, there are still
several small factories hand making goods for the fashion and
entertainment industries, and the public can sometimes tour and also
purchase from them. I have gotten to visit both M
(34:31):
and S Schmahlberg Custom Fabricflowers dot com and Wing and
Weft Glove Factory, which is we Glove you dot com,
and I couldn't recommend them more. You can bring them
special fabrics and they can make the flowers or gloves
for you, or you can choose from what they have made.
They can walk you through the process as it's been
done for more than one hundred years. The factories are
about as large as one story of a modest size house,
(34:53):
so it's easy to imagine quite a few existing in
just one building. I do not have any fur babies,
as I have terrible allergies, but I do have two kids,
both of whom love going to New York. So I'm
attaching a pick of my twelve year old daughter from
our girls' trip this past summer at the Museum of Broadway,
which was so much fun to visit. Thank you for
teaching and entertaining us, and I hope some of your
listeners are able to support these small and super cool businesses. Alyssa,
(35:18):
this is a very cool story. I didn't know you
could visit and tour those You would think that would
be a thing I would know. Yeah, now I have
more stuff on my list to do when I'm in
New York. It kind of reminds me of an alternate
version of when there are like gallery walk days and
studio strolls and things like that where you can like
tour all of the artists' studios in an area. Love it,
(35:41):
love it. Yes, go do that. Support businesses like that
if you can, because those sound amazing and I want
them to stay around so we can all visit. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you
would like to subscribe to the podcast and you have
not gotten around to that, I promise you it's the
easiest thing in the world. You can do that on
(36:01):
the iHeartRadio app, or really anywhere you listen to your
favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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