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The Sewing Machine 369 obtainable at a low price, would arouse the enthusiasm of the housewife and the manufacturer alike. But he was speedily disillusioned. It was regarded with the utmost suspicion, the public having paid dearly for their credulity by acquiring machines which were worthless and had to be thrown away. Moreover, the outcome of Howe’s litigation, whereby every user was mulcted in a penalty by having to pay a royalty to the man whom the law had declared to be the inventor, had precipitated widespread disgust. Singer strove hard to overcome this hostility. He even shouldered a machine himself and went round from door to door among the seamstresses and tailoresses. When they received him with ridicule and point- blank declined to listen for a moment to his pleadings for a chance to prove his statements, he unhesitatingly withdrew his machine from its case, connected it up, and on the doorstep would prove there and then what it could and would do. In this manner he literally forced his invention into homes and workshops. It was a desperate, uphill struggle, but determina- tion won in the end. The machines began to arouse interest and to be discussed in a friendly manner. The sceptical came to his humble home which served as a workshop, saw, and were convinced so effectively as to place orders with him. When he suggested to another inventor, Blodgett by name, that he intended to manufacture sewing machines, Blodgett, who had striven to introduce a sewing machine of his own design and had encountered heartrending failure, advised Singer strenuously to abandon such a mad project, and instead, to dispose of the rights to make the machine in certain territories for a round figure. Y