Read Life at the Dakota for Free Online

worked at various odd jobs, none of them for very long because he so quickly managed to alienate or offend his employers. Singer also launched what was to be his most impressive career—as a womanizer and polygamist. At one point, he was married to five women, none of whom was aware of the existence of the other four, and was supporting as many as six mistresses on the side. Though he apparently beat, abused and otherwise mistreated his women, they seemed magnetized by him and by what must have been his imposing sexuality. The numbers of offspring from his various unions began to mount. Once, having just married a new wife, Singer decided that it might be prudent to shed himself of the previous one. He visited her with the aim of getting her to agree to a divorce, and only succeeded in getting her pregnant with another child.
    There were many patented mechanical sewing devices by 1851 when, by sheerest accident and luck, Isaac Singer happened to become involved with them. Singer had, at this point, spent most of his untidy life more or less as a vagrant, marrying women, giving them babies and supporting himself with odd jobs as an unskilled laborer. Then, one day when he was working in a Boston machine shop, a Lerow & Blodgett sewing machine was brought in for repairs, and the job of fixing it was given to Singer. Suddenly, it was as if some long-buried resource inSinger’s mind burst to the surface and flashed like a comic-strip light bulb above his head. Within twelve hours he had made a sketch of a better machine, and eleven days later he had built one. It produced an even, single-thread chain stitch that no other machine had ever been able to achieve before.
    But when Isaac Singer set about to peddle his device, he immediately found himself in legal trouble. It seemed that his invention really amounted to a successful amalgamation of bits and pieces of other, earlier inventions, most of which were protected by patents. Without incorporating the patented property of others, Singer’s machine would not work at all. Altogether, some twenty-five different patents were involved. At least three of them belonged to Elias Howe, who threatened to sue for patent infringement. Singer approached Edward Clark, then a lawyer practicing in New York. Singer had come to Clark at least once before to help patent a slicing machine that had turned out to be a complete failure. Just why, after that first unsuccessful venture with Singer, whose reputation as an unsavory character was by then widespread, Clark agreed to take him on again is unclear. But Clark accepted Singer’s very complicated case and, in return, asked for a 50 percent share of I. M. Singer & Co.
    Edward Clark’s background was altogether different from Isaac Singer’s. Clark had been born in 1811, in the upstate New York village of Hudson, where the Clarks had been respectable middle-class residents for several generations. Coming to New York in the 1840’s, Clark made a fortunate marriage to Caroline Jordan, the daughter of Ambrose Jordan, a prominent attorney who later became Attorney General for the state of New York. Mr. Jordan took his son-in-law into his firm, making him a junior partner, and the firm became known as Jordan, Clark & Company. Thus established, the young Clarks began to make their way into New York society.
    It wasn’t easy for them, thanks to Edward Clark’s somewhat chilly personality. He was already a frustrated capitalist. In an era when one of society’s most inviolable rules was, “Never talk about money, and think about it as little as possible,” Edward Clark seemed interested in talking and thinking about nothing else. “His eye is always on the dollar,” a contemporary had noted. Clark was slope-shouldered with a large nose and a skimpy beard, and wore tiny steel-rimmed spectacles and a thoroughly unconvincing wig. His demeanor was that of asmall-town accountant, and he spoke in a flat and