Singer's Competitors to the Willcox and Gibbs Automatic

Kimball and Morton 1902 Lion Figural Sewing Machine

Maggie Snell's 'Almost a 10' Sewing Machine

International Sewing Machine Collectors' Society

The purpose of the International Sewing Machine Collectors' Society is to foster the collecting of, and research into, sewing machines.

Singer Model 24 Original Hand Crank Sewing Machine

It took until 1886 for the Singer Company to produce a competitor for the Willcox & Gibbs chainstitch machine. When it came, it used the W&G pattern of rotary hook (by then, long out of patent) and Singer’s version of the ‘Automatic tension’.

The Singer 24 was a good machine and was heavily promoted but never managed to displace the W&G Automatic from the top spot of single thread chainstitch machines. Singer persevered with it for many years with a better hand version, electric versions, even a slanted reel holder like the W&G, but to no avail.

Like the W&G, the Singer 24 also ran to a large selection of modified industrial versions including versions for the straw hat industry. It was only manufactured in America.

Singer Model 30 Chainstitch Sewing Machine

Clydebank never made the class 24 and had to content itself with a single batch of 10500 of the Singer 30 (a scaled-up version of the Singer 20 machine for children) in 1913 as its contribution to small chainstitchers.

by Martin Gregory

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