Reap What You Sew: Isaac M. Singer, His 4 Wives & 26 Kids

Isaac M. Singer was a struggling actor with an estranged wife, a girlfriend, and 10 kids between the two of them. But his knack for invention helped him launch America's first multi-national business, the Singer Sewing Machine Company. But he couldn't keep his stitches in his britches and eventually he fathered 26 children from 4 different women. His lifestyle needled his business partner & nearly unraveled the entire company!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's see. My week has been full of working on
this stuff and trying to get ahead of the curve
here and get a little bit of an understanding for
what the hell's going on with all this AI thing
that's coming in and taking away all our lives. So
that's been fun tinkering with the stable diffusion. It's scary.

(00:20):
It's harder than I thought it was going to be.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I mean, I'm kind of glad to hear that there's
some skill required.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
I was too, and I mean like it's far and
away not the skill that an artist needs to create
an amazing work of art. And the limitations are still
very present. But we should all be very scared because
it's it's coming. We should all be very scared. That's
what I'm here to tell. Everybody, run screaming into the streets.

(00:46):
The sky is falling.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Wow, you really full of.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Full of something something? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, but it is like exponential, isn't it. So it's
gonna proofs so much more quickly. Yeah, then we're going
to be ready to handle the improvements anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Anybody ever had uvulitis.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Sounds gross?

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, it's awful. Uvula swells up from uh from snoring,
that was my problem. It seems well, I literally injured
myself snoring. That's that's the age I'm at now. Had
I had a day long injury. That what inhibited my
ability to do things because a snort too hard. Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, getting old is fun. It's so fun, so much fun.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Speaking of getting old, let's talk about something old. How's that?

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Okay? I think it works a way of.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
We're old, but this is way older.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, you know what's going to make you feel young
thinking about eighteen sixty. So yeah, I e about today's story.
I got real into this one. We had a listener
named Seth Batts, who is at Seth's Sculptures on Instagram,
suggests Winnaretta Singer as an episode, so started diaming into

(02:12):
her life. She had like two chasted marriages and a
bunch of lesbian love affairs and like sounds like a
really exciting person. But as usual, we got a little
sidetracked when we learned that Winneretta was the twentieth of
her father, Isaac Singer's twenty six children. Oh yeah, so
I'm over here, like, well, what in the world is

(02:33):
going on with Isaac Singer and his presumably exhausted wife
because my god. Well, a quick click on his Wikipedia
page and we were down a rabbit hole about a
womanizing actor turned inventor whose sewing machine changed everything, not
just in the home but also in the business world.
So before we get into Winneretta Singer, let's tell you

(02:55):
all about her father, Isaac Merritt Singer, the inventor of
the sewing machine and inexhaustible ladies man.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yeah, let's go.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Hey, their friends come listen.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Well, Eli and Diana got some story to tell. There's
no matchmaking oromantic tips. It's just about ridiculous relationship.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
I loove.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
There might be any type of person at all, an
abstract concept or.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
A concrete wall.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
But if there's a story where the second plans ridiculous romance.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
A production of iHeartRadio. So.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Isaac Merritt Singer was born in eighteen eleven in upstate
New York. He was the youngest of eight kids, and
he was like, I can do better. And when he
was ten, his mother divorced his father and left for good.
So Singer Senior remarried, but Isaac didn't get along with
his new stepmother, so at twelve years old, he ran
away to Rochester. Ah boy, firstplace of Eli Banks. Yeah,

(03:49):
and also the garbage plate.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Oh, the garbage plate. Well.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
At first he joined the Rochester Players, traveling theater troupe.
American Business History or describes him as quote a fine
looking youth, tall, handsome, blonde, and cheery. He's also said
to have like red hair and other sources so picturing
kind of a strawberry blonde.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Oh sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
So he's a pretty good looking, charming, tall, attractive man. Okay,
cool personality, kind of a big personality.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Apparently his biggest ambition was to become a great Shakespearean actor. Oh,
his favorite role was King Richard.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Isaac also apprenticed at a mechanics shop when he was eighteen,
and he took to that very quickly, so he clearly
had some kind of like innate talent with machines.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
In eighteen thirty, at just nineteen years old, Isaac married
the fifteen year old Catherine Hailey. They had two kids together,
William and Lillian, and of course they were super broke
at this time. Actors back then not much different than now.
The kids dressed in rags they played in the streets,
while Isaac mostly just worked odd jobs trying to make

(04:58):
ends me. In eighteen thirty six, they packed up and
they moved to New York City. They're all actors go
to make their fortunes.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
He was like, Hey, if I'm going to be an
acting man, I got to go to the big app.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Book, the actions. When they got to New York City,
almost immediately Isaac joined another traveling theater troupe called the
Baltimore Strolling Players, and he was almost always out on
the road with these guys. He effectively abandoned Catherine and
he would go out and amuse himself with a ton
of other women in their many stops on tour. One

(05:33):
newspaper wrote, according to American Businesshistory dot org quote, his
intimacy with the female part of the population was severely
commented upon, and much sympathy was expressed for his wife. Damn, damn,
they had it in the papers. They were calling him out.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
The journalist got wyndodayse yeah, buddy, well, and apparently I
guess everybody who ever came across him, because they were
always being like, damn, sucks for Catherine because he's going
home like three ladies on his arm every night. So
when Isaac was in Baltimore, he met a beautiful woman,
and that brings us to this episode side p Who

(06:14):
was that woman? So mary Anne Sponsler and her family
had no idea that Isaac Singer was already married, but
she was super into him. They got together, they started
seeing each other, they even got engaged. He asked her
to marry him, but of course he can't do.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
That, right he's already married.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Uh huh. So eventually she must have learned the truth.
Some kind of agreement was made because Isaac and Catherine
stayed separated, and Catherine moved back home to her parents'
house with their two kids, still in New York, but
just not with him anymore, okay, and Isaac and mary
Anne moved to New York City and were like living together.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
In eighteen thirty seven, mary Anne gave birth to the
first of their ten children together.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
And apparently Marianne was always introduced and referred to as
Missus Singer or in some sources, Missus Merit, So everybody
already thought that they were actually married.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah, who wouldn't that makes They've got ten children together
and they must.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Be I mean, seems pretty committed, I guess and where's Catherine, right,
She's not around anymore. But yeah, the doubtful honor of
being Isaac's wife was still just Katherine Haley's.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
So Catherine packs up and moves takes the original kids
with him, and he's just like, well, I already got
another one. Yeah, I don't worry about I got the
spare ready to go. Ten kids here. Well, so far
in Isaac Singer's life, he proved to only be good
at one thing, getting women pregnant. He wasn't really good
at making money, which is a challenge when you've got

(07:48):
ten plus.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Children, million kids to take care of.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
He would be out there working odd jobs, doing some
acting gigs. So you know, I got a commercial down
at the local medicine show.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
He's going to walk down the streets like, hey, what
are you doing right now? Are you to come to
see a medicine show?

Speaker 1 (08:04):
Have you tried Frederick's hair tonic? Frederick's hair tonic the
only tonic that's made with real hair. Well, one day,
while he was on one of these odd jobs, inspiration
struck and he invented a drill that would bore through rock.
And this is going to be really useful for canal building, which,

(08:26):
of course, at the time the mid eighteen hundred's super
on vogue. Everybody's digging canals, right.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
What's funny about this story is that apparently Isaac was
on Yeah, He's working at one of his jobs, which
was some kind of digging job, and he was just bored.
So he was like, I don't want to do this.
I'm just gonna make a drill that'll do it faster
so I don't have to do He said.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
I'm bored, But who should be bored is these rocks.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
But I just love that because it's like, see how
useful laziness can really be, such an inspiration.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
To that work and boredom.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
You know, he did some work so he could not work.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Well. He ended up selling the patent for this invention
for two thousand dollars, and like any smart business man,
he took that cash and he decided to use it
to start a traveling theater.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Troop and they were in business decision.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
And they were called the Merit Players. Well, with all
her kids in tow, mary Ann was selling tickets for
the Merit Players and she would sew their costumes while
Isaac handled all the production duties. But guess what turned
out to not be a profitable business model, and soon
the two thousand dollars was all dried up and they
were broke yet again, kids, don't use your life savings

(09:49):
to start a theater trip. Please, please don't do that,
even if your life savings, as they were for us
when we started ours were zero dollars.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
Well, of course Isaac had to start thinking of some
ways to make some money, and he looked back and
was like, well, jeez, I invented a really useful drill
for digging canals and that got me two thousand dollars,
So maybe I'll just invent something right quick and sell
that too. So he drafted up plans for a machine
that would carve the little wooden letter blocks that were

(10:24):
used for type setting at the time.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Okay, see another need. Yeah we can make this type
a little faster.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
You see a need, you fill it, you make money.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Boom. Well, now, of course Asik needed money to build
a prototype right so he could sell it, and fortunately
he met George Zeebert, a Philadelphia publisher and bookseller, who
agreed to go into business with him, and he gave
him seventeen hundred bucks.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Hi that young man. Aren't you the one who invented
the rock boring drill. Well you seem good with money,
after all, you started a theater troop with that two
thousand dollars. So here's some more.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
So they set up at a workshop in Box and
this workshop is owned by Orson Phelps, and Isaac got
to work making this machine. Okay, but it just wasn't
working out. Unfortunately, it missed their shot on this one.
The machine itself was fine, but at the time most
of the wooden type blocks were being replaced with metal. Oh,
so there was no market for this machine.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Oh jeez.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
So Isaac's out of money again and he's like got
nothing to do. But for some reason, George Zebra continued
to finance his life. Not entirely sure what was going
on here with Zebra? Oh, because this is not cheap.
By this point, Isaac Singer had two quote unquote wives
and eight children to take care of.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
So I mean he's kind of an expensive guy to
keep on your on your apron strings like that.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
N zeb Did Zebra have a little crush on Isaac
or something?

Speaker 2 (11:46):
I mean, that's an interesting we speculation.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Mister Zebra was madly in love with Isaac Singer, a tall,
handsome actor.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Time he's like, oh in a smart and inventive Oh,
I can just put money into this hands.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Man but not good with his money. I could fix him.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
I can fix him. Oh okay, I love this. I
think I can't Jorge Bieber in love with Isaac Singer.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Let us carry that through the rest of the episode.
Speculations Historically, the train is going to be riding alongside
us this one. Well. Fortunately for George Zebra's dwindling bank,
account orson Phelps needed some help. Remember this is the
guy who owned the workshop that they were working out

(12:31):
of in Boston that he was manufacturing sewing machines. There
were practical sewing machines at this point, but they weren't
really reliable enough to be commercially successful. So orson Phelps
is like, well, hang on, there's this inventor farting around
my factory with nothing useful to do. Maybe he'll take
a look at these bunk ass sewing machines and see

(12:51):
if he can do something useful with them.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, not a bad idea.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
But at first Isaac Singer shown a sewing machine and
called it a quote paltry business and according to American
business history. He went on to say, quote, what a
devilish machine you want to do away with the only
thing that keeps women quiet, they're sewing. Well, have we

(13:19):
take away the dutiful sewing duties, They'll just be yapping
all the time. I don't want to hear that.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
Meanwhile, I'm thinking about sewing, which admittedly I don't do
a lot of sewing. Sure, in fact, I do know sewing.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
I would say, I've never seen you, Sow.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
I would say I have some sewing, like a accoutrement,
but it stays in a box in a drawer that's
never open.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
That for that emergency one day, that.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
One day when I decide, you know what, now I'm
going to learn how to do a button or something.
But it seems to me to be the kind of boring,
like hands busy work that would allow you to talk
quite a lot. Actually, And don't women have sewing circle.
The whole thing is they're all getting together to chat
and so they can and Sow. Maybe that's what he means.
He's like, they all go sit together and don't talk

(14:06):
to me, that's the main thing.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Or maybe Mary didn't like talking to him. So when
he came in the room, she was like, not now,
I'm sewing, and he was like, oh, they can't talk
when they sew. I get it. I understand women.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Now He's like, it's like pat and your stomach in
your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.
That's the stupid. Well, of course we know that Isaac
overcame his fear of women talking and he did look
at the sewing machine. So in eighteen fifty these three
men put a commercial enterprise together. It was George Deeber

(14:41):
providing all the funding, Isaac Singer doing all the inventing,
and forsuen Felt doing the manufacturing, and they had an
equal three way share of everything they would potentially make.
And Isaac Singer did figure out the trouble with the
sewing machine. So at the time it used a curved
and the shuttle moved in a circle. But I guess

(15:03):
that led to a lot of like threads maybe snapping
or bunching up badly. The thread would sometimes be pulled
too tight, so it just required a lot more hands
on that you had to fix it a lot. Okay,
Isaac replaced it with a straight needle, and then he
had the shuttle move in a straight line. And after
these innovations, they were able to create a practical, reliable,

(15:24):
and easy to use sewing machine. And I think he
also was the guy who put the pedal that was
operated by your foot. So it was quite a few
little innovations that fixed existing problems with what was already built.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Okay, if that makes sense, I gotta I gotta say,
there's no way Marianne didn't have a hand in this.
I'm she's back swing all his costumes. I guarantee he
went to her and was like, what what would make
this easier for you? M Maybe you know, I don't know,
speculation station, I guess, but I just feel pretty confident
that Mary had some input into this machine.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
It seems to me that you're probably not wrong, but
I think it goes back further because I think they
knew they knew what they wanted the machine to do,
or they just didn't know how to do it. And
Isaac is like looked at it and was like, I
figured out how to do it.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah, yeah, but you're probably but he you know, yeah,
it would just take one look at it and go
I got the fix. You probably spent a couple of weeks, right,
It probably went home was like, honey, what the hell's
wrong with the sewing machine? Why do people hate it
so much? I want you to do it with shit? Well,
I don't know, dear. I guess it's just I don't
know if there's some kind of little pedal or something.

(16:33):
I mean, my feet aren't doing anything. Maybe they could
get involved. I don't know. I'm inventing all history here,
but I like it.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Well, as long as you like it, that's what matters. Well, anyway,
they just did an amazing job because their new machine
was so super efficient that making a man's shirt went
from taking nearly fifteen hours for one shirt to taking
one hour in sixteen minutes. Wow, now that's amazing savings. Okay,
fourteen hours, I ask, hell, Yes.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, that's incredible. I also just don't know why. It
really makes me assume that there were shirt making races.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
They had a time, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
I mean if they got an hour, sixteen is a
very specific time someone had to stop watch. True, So
like they probably had a line of people at sewing
machines go.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
I think they did, because they probably priced how much
you made on how many shirts you made, rather than
how long it took you to make a shirt. So
they were like, this is the average amount of time
to make a shirt. So if you take longer, that's
your problem.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
Oh yeah. And then you know if a woman, if
someone was sewing a shirt and a factory and they
were like, we'll give you thirty two cents per shirt,
and it takes them fifteen hours, and then they make,
you know, thirteen shirts in that time. They're like, wow,
fifteen hours of work. We'll continue to give you thirty
two cents. Huh for that amount of time. Well, now

(17:53):
they just had to sell this machine, and they expected
to rake it in. Isaac Singer's theatrical training was going
to come in handy here. He'd put a cute girl
in the shop window demonstrating the machine for people, and
he would go around singing something called the Song of the.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
Shirt, which, of course, how does that go?

Speaker 1 (18:13):
We don't, oh, the song of the shirt? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (18:15):
I think you were seeing Yes.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
No, I remember this. I remember this from history class.
It was ladies and gentlemen, come on down. We got
shirts all over town. They got cuffs and sleeves and
buttons too. A shirt for me and a shirt for you. Yeah,

(18:38):
but you never got the shirt you need unless you
got a sewing machines. Come on down and buy a
sing I saw and and and everyone in town say, wow,
I owe her for this shirt. Thirty two cents about
it now? Now I'm not naked. Damn my lad, I forgot.

(18:59):
You know, there was some of the on the original
sheet music. Some of the words are blurred out, so
I couldn't.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Either, you know, regional two kind of varies.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Oh sure, yeah, do you remember the second verse?

Speaker 2 (19:13):
I was afraid you're gonna do that? Uh, get a
singer now and fill your drawer. Get a singer now
and make some mar shirts for me and shirts for you.
And everybody looks like, now, how's that?

Speaker 1 (19:29):
That's pretty good? Lovely? The song of the shirt, I'll
take toe please. Well, the song of the shirt certainly
got everyone's attention, as I'm sure it got yours, But
the sewing machine patent wars, as well as Isaac Singer's
womanizing ways would nearly tank the whole business. So we're

(19:50):
gonna take a quick break and hear all about that
right after this. Welcome back, everybody.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Okay, so we already know that is Singer technically did
not invent the sewing machine, right. Rather, he invented solutions
for existing problems and improved the design of what was
already available. Although I will throw out here that American
Heritage says even so without Isaac Singer it never would
have worked, so we can still say he was the

(20:18):
inventor of the sewing machine as we know it today.
What this means though, is that, of course a lot
of other people were involved in inventing parts of the
sewing machine that you had to have, you know, for
the whole thing to work. So there was a lot
of different patents that were involved in making a sewing machine,
and that meant there was a whole patent war going
on at this time.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
Jesus, somebody's like, well, I invented the gears, and someone's like, oh,
the noodles exactly. The guy's like, well.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Pretty much, yeah, well I like that. Yeah there Apparently
they're like I think American Heritage said, there were ten
major features that had to be present for a sewing
machine to be a useful sewing machine, and Isaac only
invented two of them, so that there's eight other patents

(21:09):
in there, right, that's going to be an issue. So
the two other big sewing machine manufacturers, which was Grover
and Baker and Wheeler and Wilson, accused Singer of patent infringement.
And there was also Elias Howe, and he was the
guy who invented several essential features, including the needle with
an eye at the point. Pretty essential and you kind

(21:32):
of needed that. So he kind of felt he had
a claim to all sewing machines that anybody was making,
because without his needle thing, y'all out of luck. So
they were all pursuing lawsuits all against each other for years,
which is very expensive. They're sinking a lot of their
profits into lawyer's fees.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
At this point.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
And the machines themselves were kind of too expensive as well.
They cost one hundred and twenty five dollars.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Oh, like that's the retail price.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yes, And this was at a time and most families
were only making five hundred dollars a year.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
Oh my god, so what a purchase for comparison, five
hundred dollars a year is what the average podcaster makes today.
That's tough.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Oh, that's a tough one. And what's funny is they
could easily have made them cheaper because according to American Heritage,
they only cost twenty three dollars to manufacture. Oh my god,
so their profit margin was prifty markup.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Geez.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
I guess of course you have to You do have
to build in some marketing costs. And they were traveling
and stuff, so I don't know how much they were
actually making profit wise, well on this machine.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
But the traveling song of the shirt chorus, you know,
they don't work for peanuts.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Well, and you gotta pay royalties. It plays on the radio.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Oh and it's a thirty six piece band.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
They probably would do social like all right, he definitely
would at anyway, all this means is that they were
doing okay, right, They have a great product that people
really need, but business is kind of slower than they
had expected. They're just not making the piles of money.
They're not Scrooge mcduckaney yet like they figured they would be.
And then there's some kind of ruthless logan roy business

(23:11):
tactics that happened at this point that Isaac Singer employed
to get rid of orson Phelps.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Oh, he's factory on it.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
That's right. He bought him out without Deeber's permission, using
money that belonged to both him and George Zieber. So
he was like, I'll buy him out myself and then
used Zebra's money. Oh so, now that Orson Phelps was
out of the picture, they moved the business from Boston
to New York, probably to be closer to Isaac's two
families and ten children. And they even found a new partner,

(23:41):
which was helpful because you know, all the expenses.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
Right, may be helpful. But this guy also decided really
quickly that he hated Isaac Singers. Isaac had gotten very
like haughty and authoritative, a little full of himself at
this point, not to mention he was pretty ruthless, and
his reputation was not exactly of the most shining citizen
in town, right, not at all. Besides his estranged wife

(24:06):
Catherine his first wife, of course, he lived with his
fake wife, Mary Ann Sponsler and their eight kids, and
then he also maintained two other affairs at the same
time with two different women, both named Ellen dam Then,
totally unbeknownst to Mary Anne, the mother of the most

(24:27):
of his children, he also had another serious mistress on
the side as well. This was an employee of his
named Mary McGonagall. She started calling herself missus Matthews and
together she and Isaac Singer had seven kids, five of
whom lived past birth, and that was between eighteen fifty

(24:48):
two and eighteen fifty nine. So a lot of respectable
people found Isaac pretty gross, pretty scandalous. And when he
tried to hire a lawyer to take on these many
patent in fringe lawsuits that he was always dealing with,
this guy flat out refused to work with them. He
was like, huh uh, I heard about you and all
your ladies, and I'm a respectable gentleman and I'm not

(25:12):
going to sully mice my reputation by taking on Isaac
Singer as a client. But he did recommend to him
to a junior lawyer on his staff. So much money
due to your level, But you should hire my friend
Bill over here right. This guy was a former Sunday

(25:32):
school teacher named Edward Clark.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
I just find that so funny that he's like, your
personal life is just too gross for me. How about
my friend a Sunday school teacher?

Speaker 1 (25:44):
Amazing well.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Edward Clark, of course, did not find Isaac Singer's lifestyle
to be very palatable himself or his personality. They were
very different men. But he did think that he had
the best possible sewing machine on his hands and that
he would make a fortune if the business was just
managed right. Okay, so he had dollar signs in his

(26:06):
eyes and he became the third partner in this singer
sewing machine company.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
He's like, the Lord says that your life is not righteous,
and you know you sin regularly, but the Lord also
needs a new wing on the Sunday's School.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
You know, think of all the good we could do
with this money. But immediately some problems sprang up because
George Zeber did not like Edward Clark. Maybe speculation station
a little jealous of this new gentleman coming in. Wow,
because the former partner was like an old guy, but
this is like their same age. Yeah, so maybe he

(26:43):
was a little like, oh, you're letting this man get
close to you. So George Zieber didn't like Edward Clark.
And Edward Clark's over here, like what is Zebra even
doing here? Like he doesn't have a formal role in
this business. We don't really need him, Like we have
income now, so we don't only need a funder like,
you know, like he just kind of felt like, who
what is guy doing here? So neither of them kind
of saw the point of the other. And then one

(27:04):
day George Zieber got sick with a fever, so Isaac
and Edwards show up at his bedside and they convinced
him to sell his share in the Singer sewing machine
business to them for six thousand dollars. Oh And Zeber
initially refused to do this, but Isaac Singer told him,

(27:25):
I've spoken to your doctor and he says, you don't
have long to live. Do you really want to tie
up your widow and a bunch of it to a
bunch of potential debts and all this litigation, with these
patent lawsuits and stuff. It's going to be so terrible
for her. You don't want all that. You just want
to take the money and run. It was only after
the deed was done that George Zeber, who completely recovered
from his fever, discovered that Isaac Singer had never even

(27:48):
seen his doctor. Of course, he had lied about the
whole thing just to muscle him out.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Of course he did. George, George, come, why did you
say send my doctor in here? I'll tell you he
was too in love with Isaac Singer. He didn't think
he'd betray him like that.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
I think I think you're right. I mean it does
this make it make sense? Because I was like, this
guy's either like not smart, this is not this, or
he's just like blinded by worship of this gentleman or something.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
I mean, this is not Zeber. Being in love with
Isaac Singer was not in our original read when we
were researching this. This is I'm this is a revelation.
This changes the whole thing. I'm loving this. You know
he's lying in bed. Oh I don't have long to
live though, Isaac. Oh my dear Isaac. All right, well

(28:37):
I suppose that business is better in your hands.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
No, Zebra, don't do it.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
I signed this deed with a kiss.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
With a kiss. Oh my god, it's so funny. I
did take a little bit of exception to American heritage,
kind of made fun of Zeber and Phelps because they
were sort of like, well, Isaac Singer had just been
honorable and like actually upheld his agreements with us, we
would have been part of the business and everything would

(29:07):
have been fine. But he went behind our backs and
did all this shady shit, and American heritage called them
gentle chuckleheads.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Oh being, And I was like, well, that's.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Not really fair to like expect someone to uphold a
business agreement to say, you're just some fool.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
But then you like learn more about George and you're like,
I don't know, he'd.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
I don't know, naive right, he really thought Isaac Singer
would do the best thing or the right thing anyway, And.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
Nope, nope he did not.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
He did the money thing. Money please many, please my many. Well,
now it was just Singer and Clark who would equally
share the financial success of the sewing machine. But they
still had all these damn lawsuits to deal with, all
these patent wars going on. Elias Howe, the the needle
eye guy, especially, was getting aggressive. He's like, it's easier.

(30:05):
It's easier for a camel to go through the eye
of one of my needles. I don't know, there's a
joke here somewhere.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
I don't know. If you're finding it better, I'm gonna
find it.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
It's easier. Hang on, there's a needle and a camel.
A needle and a camel walk into a bar and
I'll tell you what, all right, let's you gotta cut
me off? Am I cut off?

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Let's get these stitches straights.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
Oh, let's see we got something out of it. Nice.
Thanks for the save. So Elias how it's getting aggressive,
and he was Hella broke and he wanted piles of
money instead from all these sewing machine companies. He's like,
I don't like being poor. I want to be rich.
Give me my money. But he also had a really
strong case. Yeah, but all these constant battles nearly tanked

(30:52):
the entire sewing machine industry. They're spending all what little
profits they're making on fighting each other. Fifty six, a
lawyer named Orlando Potter suggested, hey, uh, why don't all
you different companies pull your patents together and share the profits.

(31:14):
Elias Howe, meanwhile, could get a royalty on every single
machine ever sold. And surprisingly they're all kind of into it.
They're like, well, I'd rather unite than fight against each other.
It's it's almost eighteen sixty and I'm gonna say something
no one's ever said before. United we stayed, but divided,

(31:34):
we fall. If only that lesson could last another ten
years or so. This was the very first patent pool
and this would later be used for airplanes, automobiles, even
the movie industry. So finally business could boom, and boy

(31:55):
did it. By eighteen sixty, Singer was the third best
set sewing machine and everybody's just stacking the paper.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah, oh my god. But eighteen sixty was also the
same year that all Isaac singers shit hit the fans.
Oh no, so, as you said, they're raking it in.
Singer and Clark are millionaires. Isaac was living like a king.
He and Mary Anne sponsoror, along with her eight kids.
They lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue. And you know,

(32:27):
our boy Isaac, flamboyant actor. He wants to be the
center of attention. So he had this giant carriage built.
It weighed two tons, it was painted canary yellow, It
was drawn by nine horses. What and it could seat
thirty one people. It's a carriage, butts okay, it's I mean,

(32:47):
it's kind of It also had beds for his kids
and a toilet in the back, and a small orchestra
would sometimes sit on the seats on the outside and
be playing him on the street.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Oh my god, it's like a horse drawn r V. Yes,
it's an arc.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, it's like a horse drawn hummer limo in a
hot tub in it.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Yeah, I had a pool and an orchestra.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Although I guess having a toilet back then was a
little easier because it was just the chamber pot.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
I mean, right, sure, that's fair.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
He just had to have a little space for it
to be.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah. Probably didn't smell much worse than a greyhound today,
am I right? Folks? Wah wah.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
So he's you know, he's flouting his wealth very loud
and clear for the whole city to see. Of course,
he's also still supporting his two kids with Catherine Haley. Okay,
but Catherine herself. He finally divorced, ironically accusing her of infidelity,

(33:55):
which is just oh my god. It's also crazy. As
soon as he got rich, he's like, Okay, I got
to get rid of this bitch because otherwise she's going
to have oh more money that I have to get
rid of her before I get too much richer, harsh here,
she's going to get more, That's what I think.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, no, you're probably right.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
So he's accuseding, he accuses her of infidelity to get
this divorce and their son William stuck up for Catherine
in court. So Isaac Singer never forgave him. He snubbed
him for the rest of his life, and he left
him the least amount of all of his children in
his will. He only left him five hundred dollars.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Oh my god, that's just an average american's annual salary,
the sweet learned earlier.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Oh good job, Ube. Wait a call back.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
Still that sucks. I know, right, I guess it was
a let me let that be a lesson of the
rest of you. Thirty two hundred kids.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
Okay, his oldest son. Very funny, but anyway, poor William.
But if y'all are thinking that, oh, how excited he
is to finally be free to marry Mary Anne's sponsoror
after twenty five years, you clearly have not been listening,
because Isaac was not in any kind hurry at all.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
No.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
In fact, a few months after his divorce, Mary Anne
was out and about and she spots Isaac driving down
the road in his carriage alongside none other then Mary McGonagall.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Oh from before.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
From before, the one who had five children with him.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
Oh my god, who he somehow has kept these women separate?

Speaker 2 (35:31):
I mean new York's a big place there.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yes, that's fair. Yeah, I mean Mary Anne did already
have suspicions about old Mary McGonagall, so when she saw
them together, mary Anne screamed out loud and caused a
big old scene, drew a whole bunch of attention, and
when she saw him back at home, they had this
big fight. According to an article called Singer and His Wigwam,

(35:54):
he knocked her unconscious and also hit one of their daughters,
and Mary Anne marched straight to the police station and
had him arrested for cruelty and bigamy. Just kind of funny.
She was big of me and they're not married, right. Well,

(36:15):
he was let out on bond because of course he
was a rich man in New York City, and he
fled to London, apparently, according to American Heritage, taking Mary's
younger sister Kate McGonagall with him.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Oh my god, Mary's like, well.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
Your sister and my girlfriend are all mad at each other,
so let's get out of here.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Also, look at the pattern. We have a Catherine and
a Kate, a Marianne and a Mary and two Ellen's. Oh,
it's like he's like, I have a lot of bities
so that y'all all got to have the same.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
Keep the straight.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
It's not gonna get tripped up by calling you all
the wrong name.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
To be fair, there were only twelve names back then. Well,
if it weren't bad enough that he took his third
girlfriend's little sister with him. While the police were investigating
the many infidelities that Mary Anne accused him of, they
found another quote unquote wife of his, a sewing machine demonstrator,

(37:17):
one of these cute girls hes stuck in the window,
named Mary Eastwood Walters, and she'd had a daughter with
him in eighteen fifty two.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
My god, man, So.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
It turns out this guy actually had four separate families
with sixteen children, all of them living in New York City.
I don't even know if the two Ellen's were still
around at this point.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
Who knows. I'm sure I would not put it past him.
That's just that he came out just some casual things
on the said.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
In addition, definitely, I mean, you got little Kate McGonagall
here too. That's not the first time they met. If
she fled to Paris with him, or can't fled to
London with.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Him, well, and Mary, I guess Mary McGonagall is also
a shop yindow demonstrator. I mean, they were all like demonstrators.
So he's like finding all these cute girls, making them
his employees, leaving me, telling me multiple kids with some
of them.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
You're telling me that a rich businessman deliberately hired young
attractive women so that he could attempt to sleep with them.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Shocking.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
I know, well, it never happened before Isaac Singer, and
I certainly know it never happened after. Glad we can
put that history behind us.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
We're better than that today. Also, I have to wonder
because they call her a wife quote unquote wife.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
So did Mary Eastwood Walters think she was married to him?

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Did? Did they? Was that his thing? Or he was
just like, call yourself my wife when we're out in public.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
It's probably because they had a kid together. Yeah, I
bet once they got pregnant, he was like, Okay, call
yourself something, and that'll make you respectable. You can like
hold your head up in society somehow.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, I can have a wife with multiple children in
each corner of town. But jeez, if I had a
child with some one out of wedlock, that would be embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Right, because she had to know he was married, yeah,
or at least think he was married to.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Married famously married. We said earlier that like even journalists
were talking shit about him running around with everything.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Well, at this point, Edward Clark was furious because all
this rigamarole with his divorce and all his extra families
and all this stuff was all over the papers. And
what was really bad about it was that Clark had
made their company successful by selling sewing machines at half
price to community leaders, including clergymen, so that they would
influence other people to buy those like the original social

(39:37):
media fluids. And now they were saying, well, I'm a
church person, you know, I am a community leader. I
can't be associated with a company with a guy like this.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
All of this, in addition to the outbreak of the
Civil War, made Clark write quote, business is pretty much
at a standstill now. Singer did come back to New
York from England to settle things with Mary Anne because
she sued him for divorce. She's a bit of a
head scratcher because they had never gotten married, as we said,
but she argued that since he had lived with her

(40:08):
for seven months exclusively after his divorce from Catherine that
they had a common law marriage. Oh, and that meant
she was entitled to some alimony payments and some assets
and things, not to.

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Mention all the multiple children we had together.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
So Singer did agree to her terms, although he says
she could never get married again. Wow or ever, I
guess because she had never been married in the first place.
And then he left again for Europe to wait for
all the accountability I mean, unpleasantness to die down right,
But of course it's Isaac Singer. So he found someone
to comfort him in his time of sorrow and we

(40:45):
will meet her right after these words Welcome back everyone.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
So Isaac Singer took himself back to Europe, but this
time he went to Paris instead of London, and he
stayed at a boarding house owned by the English born
widow of a Frenchman. She had a daughter named Isabella
Eujanie Boyer, who was nineteen years old at the time.
She was intelligent, attractive, and lively, and it wasn't long

(41:16):
before Isaac Singer fell for her. American heritage writes that
her mother had no problem with her daughter becoming the
mistress of a rich American. Some sources say Isabella was
widowed or divorced already, but others say that she left
her husband for Isaac. This may not be very likely
because she was Catholic, and of course the Catholic's still

(41:38):
very much frowning on divorce.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Yeah, and only nineteen right.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
Right, although his you know, Isaac's first wife was fifteen
when they got so. Oh man, by nineteen you could
have several divorces under your belts, a couple of kids
and a failed business or two.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
Oh man, people live life on the air, right.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
But whatever the truth of their situation was, Isabella clearly
had a pretty good idea about how to wind Isaac
around her finger, because when they came back to New
York in eighteen sixty three, Isaac actually married her like
a for real marriage, church priest everything.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah. American Heritage says that this lady was pretty savvy.
She she lost no time in building good relationships with
all of his children, right, got to know all seventy
three thousand of them, whether they were legitimate or not.
She even convinced Isaac to convert to Catholicism. She really

(42:39):
had this guy pegged. She well, she might have him pegged.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
No, I don't know what they were into speculation station.
Isabella's pegging Isaac.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
Uh huh. She's like, who's the sewing machine?

Speaker 2 (42:51):
Now, I don't know, And you were like, I lost
the threads.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Hey, hey, lost the thread. A lot of lost threads
in this well together, Isaac and Isabella, of course, Isaac
being one of the most fertile men in America at
this point, they had six children, one of which is
the subject of an upcoming episode, Winnaretta Singer, the twentieth

(43:17):
of Isaac's twenty six kids, twenty two of whom lived
past childhood.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
Oh my god. Now. Many sources also say that Isabella
was so beautiful that she was the model for the
Statue of.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
Liberty, Oh famed Hattie, the Statue of Liberty. I look
at her and I'm like, wow, gorgeous speachers.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
I mean, she's got some strong bones, you know.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Some strong bones.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Got a cool flick. Say, a statute of Liberty is
an algamo.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
I'm just saying, you know, aout the statues, a little copper.
It's a little copper.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Oh wow, you got it.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
I see, well, true coppers, but the green copper, the degree,
the vertigree is a little it's just not working for me. Okay,
I'm allowed to have that opinion. Wow, well all right,
look if you look like the Statue of Liberty, stay
out of my face. Fine, it all comes out now.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
You know, you're learning a lot, You're tired.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
You're hungry, you're porn here.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Well, I hate to say it, but that seems to
be probably an apocryphal story. Not not true.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
Oh that she was modeled after her, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
That she was the model for the Statue of Liberty.
According to Reuters, the Statue of Liberty was actually originally
designed to look like an Arab woman, a peasant. The
sculptor Frederick Auguste Bartoldi originally pitched it to Egypt to
be on the Suez Canal, but they rejected that design.
So when Bartoldi was working on a design for Lady Liberty,

(44:55):
he kind of went back to it, and then other inspirations,
including the Colossus of Rhodes, kind of affected its design
and stuff. He had a bunch of different inspirations, so
over time it evolved into a big ass Statue of
libertas the Roman goddess of liberty that we know and love.
So we'll probably have nothing to do with this fellow
point well love.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
Well, you know, I just I felt bad. So I
looked up at picture the statue of Liberty's face. She's
perfectly pretty.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Okay, I was going to say, I don't think she.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Looks like you know, you know where I think it
comes from. Huh, what a killer to smile?

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Oh my god, come on, I'm coming. I'm coming out
there to punch you.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
Come on, give us a smile, Libertas, I'll.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Punch you right in the dick.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
That doesn't help anybody, I don't know, make me feel bad. Well, anyway,
even though Isaac was now respectably married for once, for once,
this was not enough to change Edward Clark's opinion of
him his his business partner and singer. So he was

(46:01):
just totally done being in business with this guy at
this nasty reputation. So in July of eighteen sixty three,
they rancorously agreed to dissolve their partnership. Isaac's main stipulation said, Okay,
we can split up here, but neither of us is
allowed to be president of the corporation while the other
one is alive. And if I'm Edward Clark, I would

(46:23):
take that as a threat. I know, right, Okay, so
I should sleep with one eye open then.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Just like King Richard and come killing me him my sleep.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
Well, they both held considerable stock, so they were both
making a mint anyway, especially after a tailor named Ebenezer
Butterick started making and selling dress patterns. So now this
whole like pinterest culture exploded, opened up the market hugely
to housewives who could just take these patterns and make

(46:53):
their own clothes at home. And Edward Clark had actually
already started targeting them to purchase sewing machines. Remember earlier
when we said that the machines were one hundred and
twenty five dollars, when most families only made five hundred
a year. Well, Edward Clark decided, I got a pretty
good idea. Maybe you don't have one hundred and twenty
five dollars right now, but I will accept five dollars

(47:16):
down up front, and then women can take the machines
home and pay them off with monthly payments. And thus
began the first consumer credit program.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Pretty amazing, pretty remarkable. I mean, that's the smart idea.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Yeah, buy now, pay later, and if you don't, I'm
sending Isaac to your house. You'll end up with thirteen kids.
You weren't planning on happy Oh no.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
And the husbands were like, don't let him in.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Yeah, I'm terrified of for some reason, all the women
go for him.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
I'm saying, I mean, at least later you can be like,
I guess the money had a lot to do with
I mean, but I mean he was definitely a charmer.
He must have been. It was like the life of
the party kind of guy and maybe pretty magnetic.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
All handsome and yeah, probably didn't hurt that. Oh I
was making five hundred dollars a year. You make that
in a day?

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, okay, five minutes. They were also doing very well
because they were selling a ton of Singer sewing machines
to the Union Army, and they advertised proudly that quote,
we clothed the Union Armies while Grant is dressing the rebels. Oh,
and dressing in this case means bandaging up wounds by way,
because I at first was like, why is Grant dressings? Confused? So,

(48:32):
by the time the war ended, the Singer Company was
expanding internationally. They opened a factory in Glasgow. Eventually Russia
become one of their biggest markets and It made them
one of the first American companies to prosper internationally. According
to American business History, Edward Clark had hit on another
business innovation too, Like the sewing machines changed the business

(48:54):
game in a lot of ways. So Edward had tried
licensing sales agents across the country to sell singer sewing machines,
but too often they would sell a competitors model instead
of a singer.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
So Clark's was shut up and he required his employees
to only sell singers exclusively. They were not allowed to
sell another competitor's model. And he opened hundreds of local
offices from which to demonstrate and sell sewing machines and
like all over the states. And this was the very
first retail chain, No kidding, the singer sewing machine. That's

(49:28):
so crazy.

Speaker 1 (49:29):
Imagine people at the time just looking up being like, eh,
they're opening a singer sewing store.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
There goes the neighborhood, like the old mom and pop
place is gone because of the singer sewing.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
Like there's a singer sewing office right there, and another
one right across the street. He's the boy what mattress
firm or the Starbucks of its day.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
I wonder if if every people were like, ooh, it's
the sewing machine office. Do you know there's gonna be
a cute girl in the window.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Yeah, but she's got four kids with Isaac Singer.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
I can overlook it. I can over but you're right.
They became so ubiquitous that jokes were made about their brand,
including this one. Okay, why is a singer sewing machine
like a kiss?

Speaker 1 (50:15):
I don't know why is a sing a song machine
like a kiss?

Speaker 2 (50:18):
Because it seems so good.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Oh seems s E a M S. But it sounds
like s E, which.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Is also weird because it's kind of duncan on kisses, right,
because like they seem good but they're not.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Yeah, this guy's kiss.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
This is George Zber being like, don't kiss Isaac Singer.
It seems so good, but then.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
Take it for all your words. Well, Isaac at this point, shockingly,
he actually seemed to have turned over a new leaf.
American Heritage writes quote, he suddenly became a model of
docile domesticity, a doting father and grandfather.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
Interesting, Isabella really changed or maybe he's just tired?

Speaker 1 (51:08):
Right? Yeah, Well, when it seemed that Isabella wanted to
go home to France, Isaac packed up all her shit
and moved there. No, she has got him, Oh yeah,
apped up. She must have been just the most charming, smoking, hot,
delightful person, I guess, and funny. Maybe she's really funny.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Maybe she's really funny.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
Just thinking of the you know, the type of woman
it would take for me to pack up and move
to Paris. She must have been really something special, as in,
she's got fewer than three legs and a working face.
What does that mean? That means I would move to
Paris very easily?

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Well, yeah I figured that out.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
I don't know. The face doesn't even have to function.
I'm just look, if you asked me to move to
Paris right.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
Now, especially if you're paying for everything.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Yeah. Right. So they're living in Paris, and when the
Franco Prussian War broke out, they went to Devonshire, England,
where Isaac Singer purchased a big estate with one hundred
and ten rooms called Old Way Mansion. In eighteen seventy one,
American Heritage says, you know, this is the time of
life when anyone this famous will be thinking about writing

(52:22):
a memoir. But Isaac Singer had no formal education, and
in fact he was actually pretty close to illiterate. So
instead of a memoir, he decided he was going to
build this huge, ridiculous house of course that he called
the Wigwam, and this was inspired by the Petitrinal at Versailles.
It featured one hundred and fifteen rooms, a completely equipped theater,

(52:47):
a coach house big enough for fifty carriages or two
of his carriage buses, and a marble hall with of
course a grand staircase. This building cost him five hundred
thousand dollars, which in today's money is eleven million, although
I gotta imagine it would cost more than eleven million

(53:08):
to build it today. Probably he entertained all of his
kids and his neighbors there. He even once let an
entire circus come through, Yeah, which honestly I respect if
you've got a house that big and you're actually using
it for something.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
No. I was like, oh, he got a completely equipped
theater so he can go in and like do his monologue,
rite something. But actually it sounds like more like he
would let traveling theater companies use it. Yeah, And he'd
be like, I also have I come with an audience
because they're twenty fucking kids, and I can go show
all my neighbors.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
And he probably stepped into and is like, I'll be
playing your King Richard tonight right away.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
Real, you gotta imagine him.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
And they're like he did, at least we're not doing Shakespeare,
and he's like, you are.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Now tonight, you're doing King Richard. So finally, in eighteen
seventy five, Isaac Merritt Singer died at age sixty three.
Finally she said, fine, well, I guess I don't mean
to like that, but as.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
The final thing to happen to happen happened all of us.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
Ultimately, Isaac merrit Singer died. He was given a very
impressive funeral. He had a seventy five carriage procession of
two thousand mourners in Devonshire, where.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
He lived, nearly two thirds of which were his children.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
I know, right, He was like, don't take much again.
Built an audience Back in New York City, Edward Clark
was telling anyone who would listen how he was quote
sincerely deploring the loss of this distinguished invintor, and as
American heritage rites quote at once got himself elected President

(54:47):
of the company or.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
Of course, oh yes, so sorry. Oh it's tragic that
he died. Somebody sign right here, please? Oh no, oh,
I ever go on, I'll be raising my salary. Oh
my heart at ache.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
I'd like the carriage too, as a company called right well.
Isaac Singer left behind a fortune of thirteen million dollars,
which is worth closer to three hundred million dollars today,
which he divided unequally between all his kids. Sure, but
there were very bitter battles about it from all sides.

(55:20):
A lot of people contested this will like every kid
had something to say. William and Lillian, his children, and
Catherine were given the least amount. William the least of all,
since he stuck up for his mom in court, as
we recall. But apparently Mariann's sponsoror was the most combative.
She forced a whole court hearing trying to get a
million dollar settlement. But American Heritage says that most of

(55:42):
our kids had turned against her by then. I don't
know what that means. If they were like this. The
dad's got a circus, so I'm gonna go hang out
with him, he said, I don't know. At any rate,
the only witness that she could get to show up
for her side was old Orson Phelps Oh, the manufacturer
guy Wow, that he had muscled out many years ago,

(56:02):
and she eventually settled for seventy five thousand dollars, but
she made a real meal of it.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Yeah. Isabella, his last wife, went back to Paris and
she remarried to a Dutch musician in eighteen seventy nine.
And interestingly, this musician, named Victor Rubsat however that's pronounced
in Dutch, was the son of a shoemaker or schumacher.

(56:28):
But he became an internationally successful singer and violinist partly
by falsely claiming to everyone that he was an aristocrat
named Vicoltstenburg.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Crazy.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
But fortunately he was gifted the title of Duke of
Campos Deelis from the Italian king in eighteen eighty one
and he became a real aristocrat, so he didn't have
to lie about it anymore. After he died in eighteen
eighty seven, Isabella married a third time to an art
collector in eighteen nine. She died in nineteen oh four

(57:03):
at sixty two years old.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Now we you know, I've roasted Isaac a little bit
I feel because I don't think he was very fair
to a lot of these women. Doesn't seem like especially
mary Anne. But American Heritage does end it's very in
depth story about Isaac Singer by pointing out that the
only detailed account of his private life comes from the
divorce proceedings that were started by mary Ann's sponslaugh. So

(57:25):
they're kind of like, it's sort of an unreliable narrator
because she has, you know, a bone to pick. And
they write that most of the women in his life
were very fond of him. She was the only one
who grew to hate him, so we might have an
unduly negative view of him. Now, maybe all these ladies
were completely fine with this arrangement because he was like
willing to maintain the kids and like give them money,

(57:47):
and they were like fine, I don't care. Like it's
entirely possible that they were totally, you know, into it.
Interesting and they conclude quote a less prejudiced witness might
have concluded that Singer must have been more often than
not a charming, likable vulgarian, bubbling over with animal spirits,
with a voracious appetite for life, and already if rough

(58:08):
talent for savoring all its delights. Okay, so just you know,
to give him his jest desserts, right, or give him
his fair credit or whatever. Yeah, I just wanted to
include that here. And you know, unlike many men in
his position, it must be said that he did acknowledge
and support all of his kids, whether he was married
to their mom or not. A lot of men would

(58:29):
not have done that.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
That's true, that's true.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
It sort of feels like one of those things was like,
that's what you should do. So I don't feel like
I should praise you for that, but I guess a
lot of people did. Now I have to praise you
for that.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
Low bar situations, yes.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
But it is. It does seem like he really enjoyed
being a father. He mostly enjoyed his kids and really
wanted them to be around him. He's clearly spent time
with them and stuff.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
So that's so interesting. I'm curious. You know, Mary Ann
had such a right, such a story to tell if
only he had in that memoir right, right.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
And when we say he's illiterate, he wasn't like he
couldn't read or write, because he did write letters and stuff.
He just had very poor spelling and grammar and stuff.
He just clearly was book.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
He should have embroidered it with one of his machines.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
He should have had somebody else embroidered.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
Just stitch it into fabric, the fabric of our lives,
fabric of my life. It could be the title of
his memoir, Fabric of my.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Life, or or threads, the Threads.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
Of my Life Losing the Threat by Isaac Singer. A
stitch in time saves not a stitch from my songing
machine saves you one hundred Wow. Okay, all right, I
do not know.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
I found this really cool story because there was so
much interesting business history in it too that I find interesting,
and then also his insane private life and how funny
that it bubbled over to affect his businesiness. It must
have been pretty serious. That's the other thing that's sort
of fascinating about this in a way that you can't
really dive into because none of these women, of course,

(01:00:08):
have their own articles written about them or anything like that,
except for Isabella Boyeers, So you know, we get no
perspective from Mary McGonagall, for example, or Mary Eastwood Walters
or any of any of them. So I have no idea,
but you know, it sort of speaks to how differently
marriage was viewed, I suppose, or how differently men's behavior

(01:00:29):
could be viewed. American Heritage also was saying like, oh,
he was a man who just was in the wrong time.
He would have done super well you know, in a
harem times or you know, like you know, yeah, or
maybe ethical non monogamy today, but in his time people
are very scandalized by it. So it was kind of

(01:00:52):
I guess that makes it maybe more special or not special,
but commendable that he acknowledged his kids, yeah, because it
made it was so much more scandalous to have illegitimate
we sure. So maybe that's part of it too, is
that he was They're like, well, he really could have
made it a big secret and tried to cover it up,
but he was just like, no, this's my family. Everybody

(01:01:13):
knew he needed that big ass carriage around, so.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Because you never know, right, Well, I love this story,
what a weird one. I love the shirt song.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
The song of the shirt. Well, thank you Success for
the Winneretta singer suggestion, because it's We've got two episodes out,
but now I'm very excited to get into Winneretta as well.
I hope you all enjoyed this story as much as
we did. For real, please reach out and let us
know or give us other suggestions so that we can
fall into further and further rabbit holes. Our email address

(01:01:47):
is redic Romance at gmail dot com, yep, or.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
You can find us on the Instagram. I'm at Oh great,
it's Eli.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
I'm at Diana Mike Boone.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
And the show is at redic Romance.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
That's right, I'm sorry, I completely lost the thread.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
One more thread loss before we go. Thank you so
much for tuning in. Please come back to the next episode.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
We love y'all so much for listening.

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
Ye the next time, by bye bye, so long friends,
It's time to go. Thanks for listening to our show.
Tell your friends, nabors, uncles, and dance to listen to
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