Today, I am thankful for the power of preparation.
America’s first bona fide inventor, Benjamin Franklin, was a staunch believer in preparation, shunning procrastination at all costs. Franklin lived his life to the fullest. Early in his career, he toiled long hours as a writer, printer, and postmaster, living a relatively meager existence while he saved his money for the future. He readily assumed a variety of occupations and responsibilities. In addition to serving as one of Philadelphia’s esteemed printers of newspapers, he published periodicals, magazines, and an annual farmer’s almanac. Early in his career, he also accepted a cadre of local, well-paying posts, such as postmaster and politician. Altogether, his sundry endeavors would afford Franklin the financial resources to retire at a relatively early age. In his Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin would routinely aver maxims of preparedness, organization, and diligence, as lessons of life; listings of these axioms and proverbs became common fillers on his print offerings.
Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Look before, or you’ll find yourself behind.
Today is Yesterday’s pupil.
Don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today.
Does thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.
No gains, no pains.
And, my all time favorite, admittedly one Franklin stole from a French maritime proverb from the early 18th Century: A stitch in time saves nine.
Speaking of stitches, I wanted to share an interesting story that speaks to the import of preparation. For many years leading up to Franklin’s time, the manufacture of cloth and leather in textile factories was a tedious, manual task. The tailoring of these materials into clothing attire basically necessitated needle and thread in hand. As tailoring was laborious and expensive, many colonists opted to purchase their own cloth and then have family members, like wives and children, perform the tailoring at home. In the early 19th Century, one man, Elias Howe Jr., would change all that.
Born on this day (July 9) in Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819, Elias was an apprentice in the Lowell textile industry through much of his early childhood. However, at the age of 18, the great Panic of 1837 led to the unfortunate closure of many of these mills, so Elias moved closer to Boston to apprentice with his cousin, a mechanic at a carding company. There, he became readily familiar with a variety of mechanical devices, many of which operated using electromagnetism or pulley-based systems. He began to wonder how the mechanical advances he was using might be put to better use to support what he had previously learned in the textile industry.
After much deliberation and some insightful thinking, he conceived of a machine that would allow for more efficient stitching of cloth and other fabric. Although others had previously developed prototypes of the ‘sewing’ machine, Howe’s design was particularly ingenious because it incorporated 3 unique elements: a needle with the eye in the point (as opposed to the head), a bobbin-hook shuttle underneath the cloth that could turn and create a lock stitch, and an automatic feeder of the thread. He realized the 3 parts would need to work in unison in such a way that there was proper slack or pull on the thread, depending on the step in the cycle of the stitch.
He filed a patent for his sewing machine with the US Patent Office in 1946 before travelling to England to join his brother who was making headway in the sale of his invention to several British industries. When he returned a few years later, he found that Isaac Singer had stole his idea and was selling a version of Howe’s ‘lockstitch’ machine. Luckily, because Howe had heeded Franklin’s advice and had prepared a patent before his departure to Great Britain, he would eventually win the 5-year legal dispute, thereby earning significant royalties from the sales of Singer and his own company’s machines. His pecuniary success would permit Howe to follow in the footsteps of Franklin and retire at a relatively early age.
Indeed, in Howe’s case, a stitch in time did indeed save nine (and made the inventor a multimillionaire in the process). Somewhere, Franklin is smiling from ear to ear.
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