tained a learner's
place in a machine shop where cotton-spinning machinery was made and
repaired.

In 1837, when a financial panic hit the country, Howe lost his job. He
then decided to go to Boston, and this marked a turning point in his
career. In Boston he met Ari Davis, a maker of mariners' instruments and
scientific apparatus. Howe began to work in Davis' shop, a place to
which inventors often came to ask advice about their ideas. Davis
sometimes helped them, but just as often he shouted at them in anger--he
is said to have been one of the noisiest men in Boston. One day Howe
overheard his employer bellowing at a man who had brought a knitting
machine to the shop to seek Davis' advice. "Why are you wasting your
time over a knitting machine?" said Davis, "Take my advice, try
something that will pay. Make a sewing machine." "It can't be done," was
the reply. "Can't be done?" shouted Davis, "Don't tell me that. Why--I
can make a sewing machine myself." "If you do," interrupted the
capitalist, "I can make an independent fortune for you." Davis, like
most men of many words, often talked of more than he planned to do. He
never attempted to invent a sewing machine.

But the loud voices interested Howe, who, it is said, determined then
that he would produce a sewing machine and win the fortune that the
prosperous-looking man had asserted was waiting for such a deed. A kind
of lameness since birth had made physical tasks painful for Howe, and he
perhaps felt that this would offer an opportunity to become independent
of hard physical work.

After marrying on a journeyman machinist's pay of $9 a week, Howe's
health worsened and by 1843 was so bad that he had to stop work for days
at a time. His wife was forced to take in sewing to maintain the family.
It was the sight of his wife toiling at her stitches together with the
pressure of poverty that recalled to Howe his earlier interest in a
machine to sew. He decided to make an earnest attempt to invent one.
Watching his wife for hours at a time, he tried to visualize a machine
that would duplicate the motions of the arm. After many trials, he
conceived the idea of using an eye-pointed needle in combination with a
shuttle to form a stitch. It is possible that, as some authors state,
the solution appeared to him in a dream, a manifestation of the
subconscious at work. Others have suggested that he may have learned of
Hunt's machine. There is a general similarity in the two, no