James E. A. Gibbs was an American inventor and businessman.
Background
James Ethan Allen Gibbs was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia. He was the son of Richard and Isabella (Poague) Gibbs.
He was descended from Dr. John Hirpin, a Huguenot physician, who emigrated to Milford, Connecticut, in 1715, and was a great-grandnephew of Ethan Allen.
His father, a wool-carder, had emigrated in 1816 from Connecticut to Fairfax County, Va. , where he tried to establish a machine-carding business. Being unsuccessful, he went to Rockbridge County, Virginia, where he was engaged in his trade when his son was born.
He was the last male member of his family in America.
Education
Young Gibbs secured a mediocre schooling.
Career
Gibbs went into business with his father and the two continued until 1846 when their mill was destroyed by fire. Gibbs then went to Mill Point, Pocahontas County (now in West Virginia) and attempted to develop a wool-carding business with a machine of his own design.
He was unsuccessful, however, and turned to farming. In the early 1850’s his attention was directed to the sewing-machine. The pictures he saw in advertisements did not indicate the way in which the sewing-machine did its work and Gibbs, out of curiosity, set to work to solve the mystery in his own way.
After a number of months, he produced a shuttle sewing-machine with a lever oscillating in a vertical plane. This in itself was not a basic invention but it had two original features: it pulled off a definite quantity of needle thread proportionate to the length of the stitch, anticipating the later-day automatic tensions, and it fed the work positively between two corrugated surface lamps.
Gibbs patented these features in 1856 and early in 1857 patented several chain and lock stitch machines which proved to be the forerunners of his important invention of June 2, 1857, for twisted loop rotary hook machine.
Shortly after obtaining this patent, Gibbs formed a partnership with James Willcox of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in 1858 the Willcox & Gibbs sewing-machine was placed on the market.
After making the machine themselves for a few years, the partners interested the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island, in manufacturing it for them, which organization has been making it ever since.
Thereafter while Willcox looked after sales, Gibbs attended to further improvement of the device. By his efforts his basic patent was reissued in 1858 and at its expiration in 1872 was extended to 1878.
During the Civil War, although Willcox sided with the North and Gibbs engaged in the manufacture of gunpowder for the Confederate army, Willcox maintained Gibbs’s interest in the partnership inviolate and at the close of the struggle the two joined hands as though nothing had happened.
Gibbs retired from active business about 1890 and, after traveling for a time both in the United States and abroad, settled on his farm in Rockbridge County, Virginia, where he had made his home since About the land on which he lived a village gradually grew up, and when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was built from Harrisonburg to Lexington and a depot established at the village, Gibbs suggested for it the name “Raphine, ” which is the Greek form of the verb “to sew. ”
When he died in Raphine, he was survived by his widow and by three daughters of his first wife.
Achievements
Gibbs was a producer of a shuttle sewing-machine with a lever oscillating in a vertical plane, that had two original features: it pulled off a definite quantity of needle thread proportionate to the length of the stitch, anticipating the later-day automatic tensions, and it fed the work positively between two corrugated surface lamps.
Gibbs patented these features in 1856 and early in 1857 patented several chain and lock stitch machines which proved to be the forerunners of his important invention of June 2, 1857, for twisted loop rotary hook machine.
In addition, he made a number of other sewing-machine improvements (twenty-five all told) and patented a lock and a clutch-driven bicycle.
Connections
Gibbs was twice married: first, in 1883, to Catherine Givens of Nicholas County, Virginia, who died in 1887, and second, in 1893, to Margaret Craig of Craigsville, Virginia.
