Little Orphan Annie may be famous in comic strips and movies, but she was first near and dear to the hearts of a Hancock County family who called her Mom and Grandma.

These humble breakthroughs didn't just change history. They built fortunes from the ground up and still shape how successful investors grow wealth today.

A breakthrough came from Elias Howe, a Massachusetts mechanic who believed his invention would bring him fortune. In 1846, he patented a design using a lockstitch, a method that used both a top ...

Howe died at age 48 in 1867, the same year his patent expired. Upon his death, his two sons-in-law carried on his business, but by the mid 1880s the Howe Machine Co. had gone out of business. The ...

So, amid the din of bigger news, passed Elias Howe, virtually forgotten in his own lifetime — and almost unknown in ours. Jim Albanese can be reached at jimalbanese700@yahoo.com.

Numerous experiments succeeded this invention, but they failed to produce anything practical until the Autumn of 1846. In September of that year, ELIAS HOWE. Jr., to whom, in the language of the ...

THE granting of patents in the United States was provided for in the Constitution, and on April 10, 1790, Congress specified how patents were to be issued. It was, however, not until an act of ...

ELIAS HOWE, Jr., the inventor of the sewing-machine, died at his residence in Brooklyn on Thursday night in his forty-eighth year. His name is a familiar one in every household in this country ...

It remained for Elias Howe to make and patent, in 1845, the first successful lock-stitch machine, in which an eye-pointed needle and an independent shuttle, each with its own thread, were used.