NEW FRONTIERS 305
Weitling went to work at once on the assignment which his
wife had given him and in a few weeks he had completed the plans
for a buttonhole machine and employed a machinist to make a
working model. The patent for his invention was issued as No.
33,619 on October 29, 1861, and, in due course, the inventor filed
no less than eight applications for patents for improvements on the
sewing machine, five of which were allowed by the United States
Patent Office.
The resourceful tailor made all of his drawings without outside
assistance and had them attested by old friends, such as Heinrich
Ahrends, Friedrich Eilenberg, Louis Kämmerer, Philipp Eckstein,
R. Reichel and L. Kullmann, Josef Fickler, and Augustus Merkle.
Tag loaned him $2,000 to carry on his experiments, and J. Keller
loaned him $200 in 1866 for materials. Louis Schade, an attorney
of Washington, D.C., gave him legal advice, and in 1863 Carl
Schurz, writing from his camp near Stafford Courthouse, gave
Weitling a letter to the Secretary of the Interior introducing him
as "a gentleman of high character among the Germans and an old
supporter of our cause" and requesting the secretary to show him
special attention in his patent affairs. Weitling's patents included
improved devices for stitching edging and buttonholes, crimping
ribbons and cloth in fancy lines, and regulating the tension of the
thread in sewing machines.
Always the philosophical tailor who needed to reduce his ideas
to a system, Weitling produced a "Treatise" "on sewing machines
generally and on the arrangements for sewing by it buttonholes
and embroidering especially." In this document, he described and
illustrated all the known methods of sewing by machine, including
the different ways of making buttonholes, and explained in detail
how his device was superior to and different from the three already
on the market and from a fourth which was attached to Wheeler
and Wilson's sewing machine. His discussion of these machines
reveals the expert tailor thoroughly familiar with his trade who
had made a sound analysis of the Singer patent of 1855 and of the
claims of other inventors. Weitling claimed that by his invention