Eleven days later he had constructed a better sewing machine, which he patented. He was working in a machine-shop in Boston in 1851 when he was given a sewing machine to repair. Working as an actor whenever he could, and at one stage running his own small, unsuccessful touring company, he took jobs as a labourer, carpenter or mechanic when he had to, and invented various machines.
Tall, fair-haired, well-built and semi-literate, he developed a passion for the theatre. The Singers were a German immigrant family in Upper New York State, where Isaac was born in 1811, to an unhappy childhood and a minimum of schooling.
Though he did not invent the sewing machine, he designed the first practical and efficient one, used mass-production techniques to manufacture it and pioneered the hire-purchase system of buying on credit in easy instalments, which revolutionised consumer behaviour. Isaac Merritt Singer was no introverted back-room inventor, but one of the most forceful, flamboyant and unscrupulous tycoons in American business history.
0 kommentar(er)
