In 1851, Isaac Singer borrowed $40.00 to make a working sewing machine that would become the leader in the sewing machine industry and famous around the world.
             Isaac Merritt Singer was born on October 27, 1811 in Troy, New York to a large family of German immigrants.
             When he was twelve he left home and went to Rochester and worked all kinds of unskilled labor jobs until he was 19 years old. He found a job as an apprentice machinist in a machine shop. He didn't like this job, so after four months he left and for the next nine years moved from state to state and made a good living because of his natural mechanical ability. He got a lot of experience from doing this because he worked on anything that he could get paid for.
             In 1830 he quit working as a machinist and became an actor because he had a loud voice and thought he would be good at it. He really enjoyed doing this, but could not make enough money to keep him in the lifestyle that he enjoyed. He wasn't happy about giving up acting, but had to go back to the boring life of a machinist. Singer spent the rest of his life claiming great success as a stage actor.
             In 1931 he married Catharine Maria Haley. He was almost twenty years old and she was only fifteen. They lived with her family in New York. He wasn't happy with his home life and went around the countryside, working as a stage hand, advance man and as an actor. In 1836, he suddenly signed on as an advance man with another travelling group and left New York and went to Baltimore.
             While in Baltimore, he met eighteen year old Mary Ann Sponsler and fell in love with her. He asked her to marry him and they returned to New York in September of 1836. He knew he really couldn't marry her because he already had a wife, so he convinced her to wait to get married and to just live with him as Mrs. Isaac Singer.
             By the summer of 1837, Isaac Singer had a wife, a common-law wife, a son by Mary Ann and a son and daughte...