iated, restraining the slack thread from interference with the
point of the needle.

[Illustration: Figure 22.--WILSON'S PREPATENT MODEL for his
reciprocating-shuttle machine, 1850. (Smithsonian photo 45525-A.)]

The Blodgett and Lerow machine was built by several shops. One of the
earliest was the shop of Orson C. Phelps on Harvard Place in Boston.
Phelps took the Blodgett and Lerow machine to the sixth exhibition of
the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association in September 1850 and
won a silver medal and this praise, "This machine performed admirably;
it is an exceedingly ingenious and compact machine, able to perform
tailor's sewing beautifully and thoroughly."[46] Although Phelps had won
the earliest known premium for a sewing machine, and although the
machine was produced commercially to a considerable extent (figs. 20 and
21), one outstanding flaw in its operation could not be overlooked. As
the shuttle passed around the six-inch circular shuttle race, it put a
twist in the thread (or took one out if the direction was reversed) at
each revolution. This caused a constant breaking of the thread, a
condition that could not be rectified without changing the principle of
operation. Such required changes were later to lead I. M. Singer,
another well-known name, into the work of improving this machine.

Also exhibited at the same 1850 mechanics fair was the machine of Allen
B. Wilson. Wilson's machine received only a bronze medal, but his
inventive genius was to have a far greater effect on the development of
the practical sewing machine than the work of Blodgett and Lerow. A. B.
Wilson[47] was one of the ablest of the early inventors in the field of
mechanical stitching, and probably the most original.

Wilson, a native of Willett, New York, was a young cabinetmaker at
Adrian, Michigan, in 1847 when he first conceived of a machine that
would sew. He was apparently unaware of parallel efforts by inventors in
distant New England. After an illness, he moved to Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, and pursued his idea in earnest. By November 1848 he had
produced the basic drawings for a machine that would make a lockstitch.
The needle, piercing the cloth, left a loop of thread below the seam. A
shuttle carrying a second thread passed through the loop, and as the
tension was adjusted a completed lockstitch was formed (fig. 22).
Wilson's shuttle was pointed on both ends to form a stitch on both its
forward and backward motion,