Singer Put a Sewing Machine in Every House. Then It Tore Down the Tallest Building on Earth.

There was a black cast iron machine with gold scrollwork in your grandmother's house, and it was probably the most expensive thing the family owned. A sewing machine cost around $100 in the 1850s, when the average American family earned about $500 a year. So in 1856 Singer's partner Edward Clark did something no American company had done: five dollars down, and the rest monthly. It is the first consumer instalment plan in the United States, and sales nearly tripled the following year. The company was criticised at the time for repossessing machines from families who had almost finished paying for them. That invention outlived everything else. Not the needle, the credit. Within two generations it was how Americans bought furniture, cars and eventually everything. Isaac Singer himself fathered twenty four children by five women, was arrested for bigamy in 1862, fled to Europe and never came back, and died in Devon in 1875 leaving about $14 million. The company barely noticed, because Clark had been running it for twenty years. It became the first modern multinational decades before Ford: Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1863, Glasgow in 1867, and then Clydebank, which employed nearly 7,000 people, shipped 1.3 million machines in 1913, and produced roughly 36,000,000 sewing machines between 1884 and 1943. And in 1908 it put up a tower at Broadway and Liberty Street: 612 feet, 41 storeys, the tallest building in the world. It held that for about eighteen months. Then in 1961 Singer moved out, in 1964 US Steel bought the site, and between 1967 and 1969 the whole thing came down - because the tower had about 4,200 square feet per floor and the building that replaced it has around 37,000. It was the tallest building ever demolished, and it stayed the tallest ever destroyed by any cause until the World Trade Center fell one block away in 2001. This is File 008 of The Collapse Files: how billion-dollar companies die. CHAPTERS 0:00 The machine in the parlour 0:46 The Machine 2:06 Five Dollars Down 3:29 The Man Who Left 4:42 The World 6:14 The Tower 7:37 The Turn 8:51 The Demolition 10:24 The Singer File Sources: the Wikipedia entries for the Singer Corporation, the Singer Building, Isaac Singer and the Sewing Machine Combination; the Smithsonian on how Singer won the sewing machine war; the Skyscraper Museum and NYPAP on the tower and its demolition; contemporary reporting on Edward Clark's 1856 hire-purchase plan; and the list of tallest voluntarily demolished buildings. Archival images via Wikimedia Commons, public domain and CC0 where marked, plus CC-licensed photographs by TCY (Singer advertising, CC BY-SA 3.0); Boston Public Library (Mexico 'Yucatan' (front)- Singer S..., CC BY 2.0); Centro de Memoria - Unicamp (As primeiras maquinas Singer, Cent..., CC BY-SA 4.0); cogdogblog (2011-365-270 Grandma's Sewing Mach..., CC BY 2.0); Glavarhiv Moskvy (History of Singer Corporation 01, CC BY 4.0); Glavarhiv Moskvy (History of Singer Corporation 09, CC BY 4.0); josh jackson (One Liberty Plaza 2007, CC BY 2.0); Kidfly182 (One Liberty Plaza 001, CC BY 4.0); Lars Plougmann (22 Cortlandt Street One Liberty Pl..., CC BY-SA 2.0); Dennis van Zuijlekom (Singer 66K Treadle Sewing Machine, CC BY-SA 2.0, four images); Luis Miguel Bugallo Sanchez (2015. Maquina de coser Singer. Sew..., CC BY-SA 4.0); Steve Daniels (Oldway Mansion - geograph.org.uk -..., CC BY-SA 2.0); Richard Dorrell (Oldway Mansion - geograph.org.uk -..., CC BY-SA 2.0). Archival footage from the Prelinger Archives on archive.org: Around the World in New York (1940); Arteries of New York City (1941); Banks and Credit (1948); California Cotton Mills (1924); How Textile Mills Are Modernizing (1948); Sewing Simple Seams (1947); Skyline New York (1956); The Wise Use of Credit. Music from the YouTube Audio Library: "Missing Persons" (Jeremy Blake) and "Little Drunk, Quiet Floats" (Puddle of Infinity). Additional scene illustrations were created for this film; no real person is depicted in them, and the demolition and factory scenes are illustrations, not footage of Singer's own buildings. Narration is synthetic. #Singer #SewingMachine #SingerBuilding #RiseAndFall #Documentary #CorporateCollapse