Singer car - history in photographs

Does this word "Singer" or the name of the sewing machine "Singer" mean anything to you? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the name of the sewing machine "Singer" said a lot. After all, it was this easy-to-use sewing machine that was then the dream of housewives around the world and, of course, no less a source of pride for the happy owners of this machine. Mahatma Gandhi said that the Singer sewing machine is "one of the rare useful things invented by mankind."

The name "Singer" is taken from the surname of its inventor Isaac Singer. Isaac Singer came from a Jewish family. However, it is probably not surprising that it was a Jew who became the inventor of the sewing machine, because in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were a lot of tailors among Jews. Isaac Singer was born in 1811 in the small town of Troy, New York. At the age of 12, Isaac fled from his family to the city of Rochester on the shores of Lake Ontario, where he began to work and study with a mechanic. Then he traveled for a while with the acting troupe. And at the age of 20 he got a job at a factory in Boston as a mechanic, where he came up with his first inventions - a woodworking machine and a sawmill. However, commercial success did not come to the inventor.

Singer's success was brought about by the improvement of the Phelps sewing machine. Singer's innovation was that he placed the shuttle horizontally (and the thread stopped tangling); offered a table-board for fabric and a leg-holder of a needle (and this made it possible to make a continuous seam); and also equipped the machine with a foot pedal for the drive (which made it possible to work with the fabric with both hands). These three innovations have become the basic pattern of the sewing machine for years to come. And Singer was made a very rich man.

So in 1851 he created The Singer Manufacturing Company, which began to provide sewing machines not only for housewives, but also for sewing factories. By 1858, Singer had four factories in New York State and sold more than 3,000 sewing machines. Since 1908, the company's headquarters has been located in the city of New York, in the Singer Building, a 47-storey skyscraper specially built for them, which however was destroyed in 1968.

An enterprise for the production of sewing machines "Singer" was also opened in the Russian Empire. In 1902, a plant was opened in Podolsk, producing cars with the Russified Singer logo. This plant operated until the 1917 revolution. And it should be noted that "Singer" cars were popular among the women of the Russian Empire.

As for Isaac Singer himself, he was not very similar to the inventor with glasses. He was tall under two meters, poorly educated, an adventurer by nature and very scandalous in his personal life. Although he took care of all his 22 children from different wives. The last time Isaac Singer officially married the Frenchwoman Isabelle Sommerville, who is believed to have become the prototype for the Statue of Liberty, now in New York.

Today "Singer Corporation" is engaged in the production of space and military equipment, as well as sewing machines, electrical appliances, engines, furniture and other products. And in 2001 the Singer empire celebrated its 150th anniversary.