Specialist of Review and Selling Old Sewing Machine

I have read a good article in collectorsweekly.com several time ago. That article talk about an intervew between Antique Old Sewing Machine Collector Harry Berzack and Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis.
He work for a sewing machine distribution company that was started by His late father. He became interested in sewing machines in a general sense, and started collecting old machines mainly to see the technology and how it had developed. Then He immigrated to the States and have a new life caused about a 20-year hiatus in which I did very little with sewing machines, although the passion never left. Then about eight years ago, He started to have a little more time and I started to get back into it. Now it’s grown to the point where today He have one of the largest and best collections in the States.
They have a museum at our business where I house His collection. They Have taken a section of our premises here to create a full museum environment where the machines are on display.
He have almost 500 sewing machines in His collection. Initially He brought some machines from South Africa, and picked up one or two here and there over the next few years, but most of the machines—probably 450-plus of them—have been acquired over the last eight years.
That makes my collection a little different from most. Probably the best collection in the States is owned by a person named Carter Bays. Carter only collects American machines, and he has authored the standard book on antique American sewing machines. On the other hand, he have machines from America, Canada, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, so my collection is more a worldwide but it also shows cross-influences.
He decided to collect from across the world intentionally. He just had a wide interest. There’s a great museum in England, but most of the machines there are British. The German museums are a little more mixed. There are probably 10 very good museum collections around the world.
He more drawn to the ideas in the machines than the country that made them. He drawn to mechanical design and how people thought up different features. Some machines survive to this day and some were inherently no good to start with. It’s a passion of mine to see the way people thought, going back to the 1800s, and the sort of engineering they devised. They didn’t have the machine tools we have today, and yet they did some incredible work.
The earliest machines probably come from the 1840s and they’re very rare. Then you get into the 1850s, and the big names were Singer, Wheeler & Wilson, Grover & Baker, Howe—just a myriad. There were literally hundreds of people who made machines in different countries. Very few of the manufacturers have survived, and that in itself is part of the story. The small companies were gobbled up by Singer and others.
Of course, Singer is still around today and the name is still known. The Jones Company was bought by Brother, and I don’t think they use the Jones name anymore.
It was evolution. It was competition. It’s the old story: Someone’s making sewing machines and other people think they’re making a lot of money, so they say, “Why shouldn’t I?” At that time it was a comparatively easy industry to get into. Sometimes the ideas they had were not that good. Other times they ran into patent infringement problems and they were put out of business. Strangely enough, this was happening all over the world.



In America, there was a demand for household machines and a demand for commercial machines. The same sort of thing happened in Britain. With American machines, you had machines for home use, mainly with treadles because homes were bigger. In Europe, people didn’t have as much room, so most of the machines were hand cranks, which made them more portable. A sewing machine typically has a wheel on the side that’s used to position the needle and operate the machine. A hand crank is a handle that is attached to that wheel. Of course, in the commercial arena, it was all treadle and, later on, line shaft.