[Illustration: Figure 10.--MADERSPERGER'S 1839 sewing machine. Madersperger's machine consisted of two major parts: the frame, which held the material, and the stitching mechanism, called the hand. The hand shown here is an original model. (_Photo courtesy of Technisches Museum für Industrie und Gewerbe, Vienna._)]
For over fifteen years, from the mid-1830s to the early 1850s, the machine dropped out of sight. When the sewing-machine litigation developed in the 1850s, the I. M. Singer company searched out the Hunt machine, had the inventor rebuild one,[25] and attempted to use this to break the Howe patent. The plan did not work. The Honorable Charles Mason, Patent Commissioner, reported:
When the first inventor allows his discovery to slumber for eighteen years, with no probability of its ever being brought into useful activity, and when it is only resurrected to supplant and strangle an invention which has been given to the public, and which has been made practically useful, all reasonable presumption should be in favor of the inventor who has been the means of conferring the real benefit upon the world.[26]
Hunt's machine was an invention of the 1830s, but only because of the patent litigation was it ever heard of again.
During the time that a potentially successful sewing machine was being invented and forgotten in America, Josef Madersperger of Austria made a second attempt to solve the mechanical stitching problem. In 1839 he received a second patent on a machine entirely different from his 1814 effort. It was similar to Hunt's in that it used an eye-pointed needle and passed a thread through the loop of the needle-thread--the thread carried by the needle--to lock the stitch. Madersperger's machine was a multiple-needle quilting machine. The threaded needles penetrated the fabric from below and were retracted, leaving the loops on the surface. A thread was drawn through the loops to produce what the inventor termed a chain. The first two stitches were twisted before insertion into the next two, producing a type of twisted lockstitch. The mechanism for feeding the cloth was faulty, however, and the inventor himself stated in the specifications that much remained to perfect and simplify it before its general application. (This machine was illustrated [fig. 10] in the _Sewing Machine Times_, October 25, 1907, and mistakenly referred to as the 1814 model.) Madersperger realized no financial gain from either venture and died in a poorhouse in 1850.