Kufstein: The “Sewing Hand” in the Madersperger Museum

The Madersberg Museum is located in the Tyrolean fortress town of Kufstein. Kufstein is located in the lower Inn Valley and the museum is located in the immediate vicinity of the historic center, slightly below the imposing fortress, at Kinkstraße 16. Josef Madersperger was born in this house on October 6, 1768. He is considered the inventor of the sewing machine.

His father was a tailor. Josef apprenticed with him and passed his master’s examination at the age of 22. In 1789 the family home burned down, the following year father and son moved to Vienna and opened a workshop near the Cathedral Church of St. Stephen, while the mother stayed in Kufstein. However, his father soon returned to Tyrol and died in 1792. Josef continued to work as a tailor in Vienna, took the citizenship oath in 1799 and four years later brought his mother to the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy.

Back then, mountains of fabric were piling up in the factories. Due to the increased exploitation of labor and the use of machines, productivity in the spinning and weaving industry rose significantly in the second half of the 18th century. The seamstresses couldn’t keep up with finishing the garments. The need for clothing increased because fashion dictated change and the military needed uniforms. Putting the fabrics together by sewing was very time-consuming, so the mechanization of this activity was in the air.

In 1755, Charles Frederic Wiesenthal patented a double-pointed needle in London. In 1790, Thomas Saint filed the first English patent for a chain-stitch machine with a hook needle: an apparatus that was specifically called a sewing machine. In France, Thomas Stone and James Henderson patented such a machine in 1804. In 1800, the stocking weaver Balthasar Krems from Mayen in the Eifel used a sewing machine “that was supposedly used to hem red Jacobin hats for supporters of the French Revolution,” writes Hubert Weitensfelder in his book “The Great Inventors.” Krems “was the first to use a sewing needle with the eye at the tip. This step, which in retrospect seemed small, represented a far-reaching intellectual abstraction from the tailors’ previous activities and later made the transition to machine sewing possible.

In 1808 Madersperger began his first attempts to mechanically replicate the movements of the human hand. He created a mechanical “sewing hand.” In 1814 he submitted an application for a “privilege” (patent) for his first machine, which was granted to him in February 1815 for six years. However, since Madersperger could not afford the fees for this privilege, it expired again in June 1818. In the “Biographical Lexicon of the Austrian Empire” from 1867 it says about Madersperger’s “sewing hand”: “The needle with which M.’s machine worked was pointed at both ends, contained the eye in its middle and moved vertically up and down, She poked the fabric alternately with one tip and the other. It carried a 17 inch long thread, which had to be replaced along with the needle every time it was used up, which happened after about 130 stitches.” It is criticized that in the contemporary “Systematic Presentation of the Latest Advances in Trades and Manufactures” by Madersperger makes no mention of the fact that this work “does not even mention with a single syllable either the man or the other certainly remarkable facts that belong in the work mentioned, although a separate chapter is devoted to the tailoring work.”

Between 1814 and 1817, Madersperger developed a new machine “that could also sew more demanding curves,” says Hubert Weitensfelder. In 1817, Madersperger submitted an application for another machine he had invented for sewing straw hats together. It took a seamstress up to ten days to sew such a hat by hand. But the privilege of mechanizing this time-consuming work was rejected. In 1833 the next application for a privilege for a machine for processing sheep’s wool was made, which was also rejected. In 1835, at a trade exhibition in Vienna, Madersperger presented six examples of a double fabric that he had sewn together from finished individual fabrics on a machine he had invented. This fifth variant of the “sewing hand” was also unsuccessful. In 1838 Madersperger handed over this fifth machine to the Vienna Polytechnic Institute, now the Vienna University of Technology. It can still be viewed there.

In 1850, Madersperger and his wife were admitted as “fosters” to the middle-class supply house in St. Marx near Vienna. He died there just a few weeks later of old age and was buried – near Mozart – in the St. Marx cemetery. He is honored on the grave cross as the “inventor of the sewing machine.”

It was only the Americans Elias Howe and Isaac Merrit Singer who helped the sewing machine with a vertical needle bar and continuous fabric transport to triumph – the sewing machine became the first household appliance in mass production. The Frenchman Barthélemy Thimonnier achieved the title of “first sewing machine manufacturer in the world” in 1829. He had developed a chain-stitch sewing machine and sold 80 copies of it to the French army administration. Parisian tailors feared losing their jobs and burned down his factory.

In the birthplace of the pioneer of mechanical tailoring Madersperger, he is honored with an audiovisual presentation on just 14 square meters. In one showcase the origin and development of the sewing machine are presented, in another the life of Madersperger is presented; in a third box from the “Wiener Zeitung” of May 12, 1817, it is quoted that his “drive unit (machine) carries out all sewing work with human manual labor performed with speed and accuracy that far exceeds that.” The Kufstein sewing machine collection is presented behind glass, with models from Singer, Pfaff and Lada.

Monday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Kinkstr. 16, Kufstein. Admission is free.

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