At the age of twenty-one he married.  This was a rash step for him, as his health was very delicate, and his earnings were but nine dollars per week.  Three children were born to him in quick succession, and he found it no easy task to provide food, shelter, and clothing for his little family.  The light-heartedness for which he had formerly been noted entirely deserted him, and he became sad and melancholy.  His health did not improve, and it was with difficulty that he could perform his daily task.  His strength was so slight that he would frequently return home from his day’s work too much exhausted to eat.  He could only go to bed, and in his agony he wished “to lie in bed forever and ever.”  Still he worked faithfully and conscientiously, for his wife and children were very dear to him; but he did so with a hopelessness which only those who have tasted the depths of poverty can understand.

[Illustration:  HOWE’S FIRST IDEA OF THE SEWING-MACHINE.]

About this time he heard it said that the great necessity of the age was a machine for doing sewing.  The immense amount of fatigue incurred and the delay in hand-sewing were obvious, and it was conceded by all who thought of the matter at all that the man who could invent a machine which would remove these difficulties would make a fortune.  Howe’s poverty inclined him to listen to these remarks with great interest.  No man needed money more than he, and he was confident that his mechanical skill was of an order which made him as competent as any one else to achieve the task proposed.  He set to work to accomplish it, and, as he knew well the dangers which surround an inventor, kept his own counsel.  At his daily labor, in all his waking hours, and even in his dreams, he brooded over this invention.  He spent many a wakeful night in these meditations, and his health was far from being benefited by this severe mental application.  Success is not easily won in any great undertaking, and Elias Howe found that he had entered upon a task which required the greatest patience, perseverance, energy, and hopefulness.  He watched his wife as she sewed, and his first effort was to devise a machine which should do what she was doing.  He made a needle pointed at both ends, with the eye in the middle, that should work up and down through the cloth, and carry the thread through at each thrust; but his elaboration of this conception would not work satisfactorily.  It was not until 1844, fully a year after he began the attempt to invent the machine, that he came to the conclusion that the movement of a machine need not of necessity be an imitation of the performance of the hand.  It was plain to him that there must be another stitch, and that if he could discover it his difficulties would all be ended.  A little later he conceived the idea of using two threads, and forming a stitch by the aid of a shuttle and a curved needle with the eye near the point.  This was the triumph of his skill.  He had now invented a perfect sewing-machine, and had discovered the essential principles of every subsequent modification of his conception.  Satisfied that he had at length solved the problem, he constructed a rough model of his machine of wood and wire, in October, 1844, and operated it to his perfect satisfaction.  His invention is thus described: