Elias Howe was a lame boy and not very strong. Despite these handicaps he was always cheerful and willing to work. Each day he worked hard with his father and brother on the farm and in the gristmill.

During his boyhood, he was especially interested in tools and machines. When he wasn't working, he often stole away to his father's workshop. There he loved to repair and even to improve pieces of equipment, used on the farm or in the mill.

While Elias was still young, he and his father made a trip to Lowell, Massachusetts. There he had a chance to see machines making thread out of cotton. He saw other machines weaving the tread into cloth.

Elias was fascinated with these machines. He noticed however, that no machines were sewing pieces of cloth together. Then and there he decided that some day he would like to make a machine that would sew.

The Howe family was very poor, and Elias had little opportunity to go to school. When he was twelve years old, he went to work on a neighboring farm. The job was very difficult for a boy and required many long hours of work a day.

When Elias quit his job on the farm a year or so later, his employer gave him a coy of the Young Engineer's Guide. Elias prized this book very highly and read it repeatedly from cover to cover.

Elias quit school at the age of fourteen and went to Lowell to work in a machine shop. He studied the machines in the shop very carefully and came to know all about them. He wanted to learn all that he could about machines, because he still was interested in inventing a sewing machine. He felt that he could never learn too much.

Before Elias could actually work on a sewing machine, he had to overcome many obstacles. First, he married young and had to support a wife and three children. Second, he had no place where he could experiment satisfactorily on his project. Finally, a boyhood friend came to his rescue. He took care of Elias' family for a time and even fitted up a workshop where Elias could carry on his experiments.

In writing this interesting story, Jean Corcoran has caught the true spirit of Elias Howe's life. This spirit, coupled with his amazing talent for mechanics, enabled him to attain his inventive goal and finally to win riches for himself and his family.

From the dust jacket