There Howe was born in 1819. His father
was an unsuccessful farmer, who also had some small mills, but
seems to have succeeded in nothing he undertook.
Young Howe led the ordinary life of a New England country boy,
going to school in winter and working about the farm until the
age of sixteen, handling tools every day, like any farmer's boy
of the time. Hearing of high wages and interesting work in
Lowell, that growing town on the Merrimac, he went there in 1835
and found employment; but two years later, when the panic of 1837
came on, he left Lowell and went to work in a machine shop in
Cambridge. It is said that, for a time, he occupied a room with
his cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, who rose from bobbin boy in a
cotton mill to Speaker of the United States House of
Representatives and Major-General in the Civil War.
Next we hear of Howe in Boston, working in the shop of Ari Davis,
an eccentric maker and repairer of fine machinery. Here the young
mechanic heard of the desirability of a sewing machine and began
to puzzle over the problem. Many an inventor before him had
attempted to make sewing machines and some had just fallen short
of success. Thomas Saint, an Englishman, had patented one fifty
years earlier; and about this very time a Frenchman named
Thimmonier was working eighty sewing machines making army
uniforms, when needle workers of Paris, fearing that the bread
was to be taken from them, broke into his workroom and destroyed
the machines.
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