for hard coal-burning stoves, the first home knife sharpener, and a restaurant steam table apparatus. He also invented the precursor of the Winchester repeating rifle and the forerunner of the American fountain pen as used in the twentieth century. Additionally, Hunt invented a flax spinner, an improved oil lamp, artificial stone, the first rotary street sweeping machine, mail sorting machinery, velocipedes, and ice plows. He also made improvements to guns, cylindro-conoidal bullets, ice-breaking wooden hull boats, paraffin oil candles, velocipedes, machines for making rivets and nails, and self-closing inkwells. He also invented the Antipodean Performers suction-cup shoes claimed to be used by circus performers to ascend up solid side walls and walk upside down across high ceilings. He did not realize the significance of many of his inventions when he produced them and sold off most of his patent rights to others for low prices making little for himself in the long run. In the twentieth century many of his patented devices were widely used everyday common products. Sewing machine He developed the first modern feasible operating sewing machine sometime between the years 1835 and 1837 at his Amos Street shop that was up a narrow alley in Abingdon Square at the borough of Manhattan in the city of New York. He manufactured and sold a few of these machines at the time. He never initially patented the mechanical device he created that used a lockstitch for sewing. It had a characteristic of an eye-pointed needle and used two threads whereby one thread passed through a twisted loop in the other thread and then both interlocked. The uniqueness of this was that it was the initial time an engineer or technician inventor had not imitated a single stitch done by hand and used two interlocking threads at a seam. He used a technique for sewing which was revolutionary at the time. The eye opening was near the point of the needle and operated on a vibrating arm and a loop was formed under the cloth by this thread through which a shuttle, reeling off another thread, was forced back and forth making an interlocked stitch. Hunt completed his working model before he showed it to anyone. Hunt sold one-half the patent rights in 1834 to businessman and blacksmith George A. Arrowsmith who never manufactured it to sell. He instead had Hunt's wooden version duplicated in iron by Adoniram, Hunt's brother.