Helen Blanchard

Helen Augusta Blanchard was an American inventor of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who received 28 patents between 1873 and 1915, most of them for sewing machines and sewing technology. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1840 to a shipowner's family, she moved to Boston after her father's business failed in the panic of 1866 and set out to make a living as an inventor, borrowing money to pay for her first patents. Her best known invention, patented in 1873, was an improvement to the sewing machine that formed a zig-zag or buttonhole stitch, which gives strength to a seam. She went on to patent over-seaming machines that could sew and trim knitted goods at once, elastic seams for garments, elastic goring for shoes, a hat sewing machine and a pencil sharpener. Most of her designs were meant for commercial clothing factories. She founded the Blanchard Overseaming Company in Philadelphia in 1881 and the Blanchard Hosiery Machine Company in 1882, later lived in New York, and returned to Portland in 1901. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006, and one of her zig-zag machines is held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.