OK, he didn't invent it precisely, since like all good machines it was the product of much tinkering by many hands over time. But he had enough of the details worked out and patented that when Isaac Singer brought his version to market ten years later the courts made him pay Howe real cash for every unit sold. Very Microsoft. Very DOS. Very Bill Gates. Howe got very rich.
The same year Howe filed his patent, Margaret Fuller was examining the work of a strange poet named Edgar Allan Poe. Poe had a career trajectory like Kurt Cobain - he scored huge, immediate fame when The Raven was published in 1845 but had gone crazy and died (under mysterious circumstances) four years later. Oh yeah, but Poe didn't make any money.
Poe frustrated but fascinated Fuller, not least because of the literary powers he had exhibited as a child:
"The poems written in youth, indeed, in childhood, before the author was ten years old, are a great psychological curiosity. Is it the delirium of a prematurely excited brain that causes such a rapture of words? What is to be gathered from seeing the future so fully anticipated in the germ? The passions are not infrequently felt in their full shock, if not in their intensity, at eight or nine years old, but here they are reflected upon -
"Sweet was their death - with them to die was rife
With the last ecstasy of satiate life."
With the last ecstasy of satiate life."
It is noteworthy that Poe and Fuller were born within a mile of each other and shared nearly identical, unnaturally short lifespans (1809-1849 vs 1810-1850). She clearly had a thing for prodigies and the fast burning, obsessive, kinda damaged types. Beethoven, Goethe, Shelley and Napoleon all fell into her focus in the mid-1840s.
