SPEAKER_03: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Emma Twin. I'm a virtual twin for Dassault Système. My job, simulate multiple medical conditions on myself to develop new treatments for all. Basically, I'm like a crash test dummy for healthcare. It may sound like science fiction, but in fact, it's just science. I explain it all on my LinkedIn account. Look up Emma Twin from Dassault Système.
SPEAKER_07: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_01: Gillette adverts stand against toxic masculinity. Budweiser makes specially decorated cups to encourage non-binary and gender fluid people to feel pride in their identity. These examples of woke capitalism, of corporations promoting progressive social causes, feel ostentatiously up to the moment. But woke capitalism isn't as new as you might think. Back in 1850, social progress had further to go. A couple of years earlier, American campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton caused controversy at a women's rights convention by calling for women to get the vote. Even her supporters worried that that was too ambitious. Meanwhile, in Boston, a failed actor was trying to make his fortune as an inventor. He had rented space in a workshop showroom, hoping to sell his machine for carving wooden type, but wooden type was falling out of fashion. The device was ingenious, but nobody wanted to buy one. The workshop owner invited the inventor to take a look at another product he was struggling with, a sewing machine, and it didn't work very well. Nobody had succeeded in making one that did, though inventors had been trying for decades. The opportunity was clear. True, the time of a seamstress wasn't expensive. As the New York Herald said, we know of no class of workwomen who are more poorly paid for their work or who
SPEAKER_06: suffer more privation and hardship. But sewing took so much time, 14 hours for a single shirt,
SPEAKER_01: there'd be a fortune in speeding it up. And it wasn't only seamstresses who suffered. Most wives and daughters were expected to sew. This never-ending, ever-beginning task, in the words of contemporary writer Sarah Hale, made their lives nothing but a dull round of everlasting toil.
SPEAKER_07: In that Boston workshop, the inventor sized up the machine and quipped, you want to do
SPEAKER_04: away with the only thing that keeps women quiet. That failed actor turned inventor was Isaac Merritt
SPEAKER_01: Singer. He was flamboyant, charismatic, capable of great generosity, but ruthless too. He was an incorrigible womanizer who fathered at least 22 children. For years he managed to run three families, not all of whom were aware the others existed and all while technically still married to someone else entirely. At least one woman complained that he beat her. Singer was, in short, not a natural supporter of women's rights, although his behavior might have rallied some women to the cause. His biographer, Ruth Brandon, dryly remarks that he was the kind of man who adds a certain backbone of solidity to the feminist movement. Singer contemplated the machine. In place of the shuttle going round in a circle, he told the workshop owner, I would have
SPEAKER_04: it move to and fro in a straight line and in place of the needle bar pushing a curved needle horizontally, I would have a straight needle moving up and down. Singer patented his tweaks
SPEAKER_01: and started to sell his version of the machine. It was impressive, the first design that really worked. You can make a shirt in just an hour. Unfortunately, it also relied on various other innovations which had already been patented by other inventors, such as the grooved eye pointed needle to make a lock stitch and the mechanism for feeding the cloth. In the sewing machine war of the 1850s, rival manufacturers showed more interest in suing each other for patent infringement than selling sewing machines. Finally, a lawyer banged heads together. Between them, he pointed out, four lots of people owned patents to all the elements you needed for a good machine. Why not license each other and work together to sue everyone else? Freed from legal distractions, the sewing machine market took off and Singer came to dominate it. That might have surprised anyone who'd seen the rivals factories. Others rushed to embrace what was known as the American system of manufacturing using bespoke tools and interchangeable parts. Yet Singer was late to the party. For years, his machines were made from hand filed parts and store bought nuts and bolts. But Singer and his canny business partner, Edward Clark, were pioneers in another way. Marketing. Sewing machines were expensive, costing several months income for the average family. Clark came up with the idea of higher purchase. Families could rent the machine for a few dollars a month and when their rental payments totaled the purchase price, they would own it. It helped overcome the bad reputation built up by the slower, less reliable machines of bygone years. So did Singer's army of agents who would set up the machine when you bought it and call back to check it was working. Still, all these marketing efforts faced a problem and that problem was misogyny. For a flavour of the attitudes the women's rights campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton was up against, consider two cartoons. One shows a man asking why buy a sewing machine when you can marry one? In another, a salesman says women will get more time to improve their intellects. The absurdity was understood. Such prejudice fuelled doubts that women could operate these expensive machines. Singer's business depended on showing that they could, no matter how little respect he might have shown for the women in his own life. He rented a shop window on Broadway and employed young women to demonstrate his machines. They drew quite a crowd. Singer's adverts cast women as decision makers. Sold only by the maker directly to the women of the family. They implied
SPEAKER_01: that women should aspire to financial independence. Any good female operator can earn with them $1,000
SPEAKER_05: a year. By 1860, the New York Times was gushing. No other invention had brought so great a relief
SPEAKER_01: for our mothers and daughters. Seamstresses had found better remuneration and lighter toil. Still, the Times rather undercut its gender-conscious credentials by attributing all this to the inventive genius of man. Perhaps we should ask a woman. Here's Sarah Hale in
SPEAKER_01: Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine. The needle woman is able to rest at night and have time through the
SPEAKER_03: day for family occupations and enjoyments. Is this not a great gain for the world?
SPEAKER_01: There are plenty of skeptics about woke capitalism today. It's all just a ruse to sell more beer and razors, isn't it? But perhaps it is. Isaac Singer liked to say he cared only for the dimes, but he also showed that social progress can be advanced by the most self-interested of motives.
SPEAKER_07: Ruth Brandon's biography of Isaac Singer is called Singer and the Sewing Machine, a capitalist romance. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things. Here's a question. A man escapes from one of the world's most brutal dictatorships.
SPEAKER_02: He's risked everything to do it, but once he's free, he digs a hole and he tunnels straight back in again. Why? I'm Helena Merryman, and over the past six months, I've been investigating an extraordinary escape story for the BBC, a story involving a tunnel, a spy, and an American TV network. It's called Tunnel 29. Just search for Tunnel 29 wherever you get your podcasts.
