o-called three-cord thread.

About 1815 James Coats, also of Paisley, started manufacturing thread at
Ferguslie, Scotland. His two sons took over the company in 1826 and
formed the J. & P. Coats Company. Another brother, Andrew Coats, became
the selling agent in the United States about 1840. But the cotton-thread
industry was not fully launched.

As reported in an 1853 _Scientific American_, there was "more American
thread made ten years ago than there is today."[92] It was not until the
six-cord cabled cotton thread, which was suitable for both machine and
hand sewing, was perfected that the industry progressed into full
operation.

FOOTNOTES:

[91] William R. Bagnall, _Textile Industries of the United States_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1893), vol. 1, p. 164.

VI. Biographical Sketches

BARTHELEMY THIMONNIER

The first man known to have put a sewing machine into practical
operation, Barthelemy Thimonnier, was a Frenchman of obscure parentage.
His father, a textile dyer of Lyon, left that city in 1793 as a result
of the Revolution and journeyed with his family to l'Arbresle where
Barthelemy was born in August of that year.

The family resources were small, and, although the young Thimonnier was
able to begin studies at the Seminaire de Saint-Jean at Lyons, he soon
was forced to leave school for financial reasons and return to his home,
then at Amplepuis. There he learned the tailoring trade and by 1813 was
fairly well established in his own shop.

At that time many of the town's inhabitants were weavers and almost
every house possessed one or two looms. The noise of the shuttle echoed
from these family workshops. Thimonnier noted the relatively small
amount of time needed to weave a fabric compared with the slow
painstaking task of sewing a garment by passing the needle in and out
for each stitch of each seam. When his mind began to dwell on the idea
of producing a machine to do this stitching, another of the town's
occupations supplied him with a clue and an additional incentive. This
village industry produced a type of embroidery work called _point de
chainette_, in which a needle with a small hook was used to form the
chainstitch, a popular type of decorative stitch long used in countries
all over the world. It was Thimonnier's plan to use this type of hooked
needle and produce the stitch by machine, employing it both as a
decorative stitch and a seam-forming one.

In 1825 Thimonnier moved to St. Etienne