4. Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave

On April 22nd, 1862, Mary Ann Singer sued her husband Isaac for a divorce, claiming, among other things, that he was violently abusive. Since Isaac Singer was the inventor of the first practical sewing machine and co-founder of the first true multinational corporation, Mary Ann was granted a preliminary allowance of $8,000 a year. The largest alimony ever granted an American history up to that point. But she faced a serious legal impediment. Although they had been together for nearly 25 years, during which time she had given birth to eight children, she and Isaac had never actually been married. Welcome to You Can't Take It With You. My podcast about the lives and afterlives of some of America's greatest fortunes. I'm Eric Schoenberg, a research psychologist, particularly interested in people who build up enormous fortunes which they leave behind after they die. Why do they do it? A common explanation for these giant bequests is that these people want to establish a dynasty. That is, they're willing to forego spending the money themselves so that their children, grandchildren, and future descendants can spend it. Of course, this doesn't explain the behavior of those who die rich but don't have any children, like the four people I've already profiled. And it's worth noting that there's zero evidence that people without children are, in fact, any less likely to die rich than those who do have children, which this theory would predict. And a database I created of around 200 of the richest Americans in history, about one fifth of them were childless. But even in the case of the rich people who did have children, can we necessarily conclude that they left all that money behind because they wanted to help their kids? And so I start by looking at the guy on my list who had the most children of all, 22 of them by five different women, only two of whom he married. Isaac Merritt Singer was born October 27, 1811, in rural New York, the youngest of eight children. His father was a half-Jewish German immigrant who had changed his surname from Ryzenger and married a Quaker. When Isaac was 10 years old, his mother filed for divorce and won. Although the only legal basis for divorce in New York at that time would have been her husband's adultery, the law still awarded custody of the children to the father, and Isaac never saw his mother again. When his father remarried two years later, 12-year-old Isaac left home for the growing city of Rochester, where he presumably lived with an older brother. For the next seven years, he worked three-quarters of the time and attended school the rest. In 1830, at 19, he entered into a apprenticeship at a machine shop and married 15-year-old Catherine Maria Haley, moving in at first with his new in-laws. Singer left this apprenticeship after only four months, claiming later that he learned so fast that he didn't need any more time. More likely, he left because he had fallen in love with the theater, discovering in himself an insatiable desire to be on stage. Whereas a six-foot-four-inch redhead with a booming voice, he was certainly noticeable, if not necessarily good. After a few years of pretending to work at a dry goods store while giving impromptu performances for the shoppers, and another couple of years roaming the area looking for any theatrical job he could find, in early 1836, Mr. and Mrs. Singer moved to New York City, possibly because he was attracted by its large number of theaters, but also possibly because he had developed a sketchy local reputation as an unreliably married man. They brought with them their young son, William, born in 1834. Singer once again made a brief excursion into the working world, taking a job in a printing shop, but within a couple of months of their arrival, he abandoned his wife and son to hit the road with a group of traveling actors performing temperance plays and moral reform melodramas. Now one thing to be said for Isaac is that he fully embibed his anti-temperance role. He was never known as a drunk or a drinker at all, but he persistently fell quite a bit short on the moral reform side. When the tour visited Baltimore, he became smitten with a 19-year-old girl named Mary Ann Sponsler. Many years later, Mary Ann would testify that he had told her that he was unmarried in order to persuade her to move to New York City with him in September 1836, where she soon discovered that he already had a wife and child. But Isaac Singer was nothing if not persuasive, and Mary Ann was sued when he explained that he simply couldn't afford the $50 he would need to file for a divorce from Catherine, telling her, "If you will consent to live with me as my wife until I have obtained the means and become able to get rid of this other woman, I will make you my wife." Now Singer was every bit as duplicitous as he was persuasive, because whatever he said to his legal wife Catherine when he returned to New York, she would give birth to their second child, a daughter, Lillian, the following year, despite the fact that by then Isaac had moved in with Mary Ann, who also gave birth to a son, Isaac Augustus, known as Gus, in July 1837. Unable to support herself in two children in New York City, Catherine returned to her family in rural upstate New York. And the following year, Mary Ann and her child also moved back to her parents' home, while Singer once again traveled the country looking for theatrical roles. This time, his wanderings took him to the Midwest, where to feed himself he began working as a day laborer digging the Illinois and Michigan canal, a job which enabled him to put his brief machine shop apprenticeship and natural skills as a tinkerer to good use by developing a machine to drill rock, for which he obtained his first patent, which he proceeded to sell for $2,000, a tidy sum in 1839. Singer used the money to form a traveling company he called the Merit Players after his middle name. He sent for Mary Ann and baby Gus to join him, gave her acting lessons, and for five years they traveled the country performing as Mr. and Mrs. Merit. Mary Ann gave birth three more times while on the road. By 1844, they had spent his entire patent windfall and washed up in Fredericksburg, Ohio, once again, destitute, and so Singer once again took a job. This time, carving the wooden blocks with embossed letters that rural printers used in their presses instead of more expensive metal type. And once again, he invented a machine to do the job better, getting his second patent in 1849. That same year, the Singer family moved back to New York City so he could find buyers for this new machine. But after his prototype was destroyed when the building where it was stored accidentally exploded, he found a new investor who suggested that Boston would be a better location to start a fresh. So in 1850, the 39-year-old Singer left his family yet one more time to move to Boston, where he rented the first floor in a machine shop owned by a man named Orson Phelps, whose primary business on the second floor was the manufacturer and repair of sewing machines based on a design by two local inventors. The idea of a machine to replace the tedious and time-consuming process of sewing by hand was already 50 years old by 1846, when Elias Howe received a patent for the key innovation of putting the eye at the front of the needle rather than at the back. But the new machines were still so complicated and bulky that they required regular intervention by trained mechanics. Phelps' shop spent far more time repairing machines than manufacturing them. Singer was initially resistant to becoming involved with sewing machines, which he considered a "feminit" compared to the manly machines he had previously worked on, but Phelps convinced him good money could be made by improving the machines and so Singer set to work. To be clear, Isaac Singer did not invent the sewing machine, and despite his own grand sense of himself, he never claimed to have done so, but he did make several key improvements for which he received a US patent in 1851. By then, he had already formed the IM Singer and Company Partnership to sell the Singer and Phelps Belay Stitch Sewing Machine. But their machine did use a needle with the eye at the front, and when Elias Howe saw a Singer machine being demonstrated in a shop window display in New York City, he approached Singer and angrily demanded $2000 dollars for the right to use his patent. Singer, who towered over how, had neither the inclination to pay, nor any money to do so, and told how to get lost. How sued. Which in the lucky life of Isaac Singer might have been his luckiest break of all. He didn't have the money to hire a lawyer much less pay how off, but since by this point he had already forced out his early partner Orson Phelps, he decided to offer a partnership in the business to a lawyer named Edward Clark in lieu of paying him legal fees, a decision which would prove to be the best Singer ever made. Not because Clark was a great lawyer, he lost the first round of the lawsuit in 1854 when a court awarded how $15,000 in damages, plus $25 in royalties on all-machine sold. But because Clark turned out to be a visionary businessman who would become the driving force behind the world's first true multinational manufacturing business. First, Clark forged a solution not just to his patent problems, but to the bigger sewing machine war of which they were a part. How's wasn't the only key patent needed to produce an effective and affordable sewing machine? And the competitors were spending as much time suing each other as they were building and selling sewing machines. So in 1856, Clark convinced how and two other patent holders to join Singer in the first ever patent pool, which assigned all the patents to a new entity called the Sewing Machine combination, which then licensed them back to manufacturers for a fixed fee of $15 per machine. And Singer got back $5 of that amount for its own patents. Clark had cut their royalty cost from $25 per machine to $10. More important, by settling the patent issues, Clark shifted competition into areas that played to both partners' strengths. Singer had designed and built a sturdy and reliable machine to which he added a dozen more patented innovations over the next few years, allowing the company to drive manufacturing costs down relentlessly, especially after they borrowed the concept of interchangeable parts from the gun industry, until they could manufacture a machine for around $23 that they could sell at a retail price of $110. Singer's theatrical training also made him an incredibly effective salesman in front of a crowd, where he would perform a mockish poem about the drudgery of manual sewing called the Song of the Shirt. A mechanic who worked with him called him, "Companyable, a good storyteller. His genius for acting came into good play. The world was made brighter by his presence." Clark was just as innovative on the business and organizational side. To entice buyers skeptical about replacing poorly functioning machines that they'd already paid for, Clark decided to offer a new machine. He offered Singer customers a $40 credit for used machines, which were then destroyed, removing them from the market entirely. In 1856, the company introduced a smaller, cheaper machine designed specifically for home use, which would open a vast new market when Clark also came up with the first ever, installment purchase rent to own plan. Singer and company grew from a production of 883 machines in 1855 to 20,000 machines in 1863. Clark's greatest innovation may have been his new model for international sales. Singer built a massive manufacturing plant in Scotland and established directly owned agencies to sell machines around the world. Singer instruction manuals were translated into 50 languages. As early as 1861, the company was selling more machines outside of the United States than within, which would allow for continued growth even through the disruption of the US Civil War. 30 years later, Singer would be selling 14 million machines a year. By the beginning of 1860, the profits were rolling in, and the two partners were on their way to becoming ridiculously rich, with only one fly in the ointment. Isaac Singer and Edward Clark hated each other, and their Civil War had been brewing almost as long as the national one that was also on the verge of exploding. Isaac was now living with Mary Ann and their eight children in a fancy townhouse on Fifth Avenue, where they were viewed as garishly newvo reach. The family rode around town in a giant canary yellow carriage, which fit 31 passengers inside with room for an entire orchestra on its roof, a vehicle designed and patented by Isaac himself. Worse from the perspective of the conservative Clark, he knew of Singer's irregular marital history. His first wife Catherine and their two children had returned to New York City in 1849, around the same time that Isaac and Mary Ann did, and were now living in Brooklyn where Catherine operated a boarding house. Clark and his wife were both deeply religious, upstanding members of New York's social elite, and Clark's wife particularly hated Singer, who she wouldn't even let in her house. So Clark and Singer never socialized, almost from the start of their partnership, she had been asking her husband to, sell out, and leave the nasty boat. Now, the growing success of the business raised the risk that Singer's adultery might be discovered, so Clark apparently succeeded where Mary Ann had not, in convincing Singer to finally divorce Catherine. According to testimony from their daughter Lillian, in January 1860, Clark visited Catherine to offer her $10,000 if she would agree to allow Singer to divorce her on the basis of her adultery. Clark warned her that business wasn't good, and that Isaac's financial situation was shaky, so she agreed, and the divorce was granted within weeks. Singer was finally free to marry Mary Ann. But despite their 24 years and eight children together, now ranging in age from 23 to 3, Isaac decided that he didn't want to do so after all, telling Mary Ann that he feared that if he did, she would have him in her power. A few months later, in August 1860, Mary Ann was in her carriage riding down Fifth Avenue, when she spotted Isaac riding in a carriage with another woman, and her feelings about his betrayal came gushing out of her. She began screaming wildly at Isaac as he fled the scene. When he returned home that night, he beat her, and she then upped the ante by having him arrested for assault. The newspapers had a field day reporting on what everyone assumed was a standard marital dispute. Isaac fled to Europe. While he was abroad, however, his public relations problem went from bad to catastrophic. Since it turned out that the 1850s were as productive for Singer personally as they were for his business. First, it was revealed that the woman Mary Ann saw Singer riding with, Mary McGonacall, had had five children with him over the last eight years, and had set up a household with him as Mr. and Mrs. Matthews. Then, it was learned that he had also set up a household with a woman named Mary Walter, and they were known as Mr. and Mrs. Merritt, and they too had had a daughter together in 1852. It seems Singer had a thing for Mary's, which undoubtedly made it easier to not confuse the name of the woman he was with. But the final straw for Mary Ann came when Isaac finally returned to the United States in the summer of 1861, presumably because by this time the Civil War had drawn the press's attention elsewhere. After hearing that Isaac was living in New York with yet another woman in April 1862, Mary Ann sued Isaac for divorce. Of course, Mary Ann faced a serious legal impediment, namely the fact that she and Isaac had never actually married. But she asserted that the seven months that they lived together following Isaac's divorce from Catherine created a common law marriage, and her lawsuit painted Singer as a violent and dangerous cat. During my whole married life, I have received from my husband the most cruel and inhuman treatment. He has repeatedly beaten and choked me to insensibility, frequently forcing the blood to flow in streams from my nose, mouth, face, head, and neck. His very presence in the house was a perpetual terror to all its inmates, family and servants. About a year prior to his arrest, my husband beat me almost to death, merely assigning as a reason therefore that I had placed in our bedroom a box of matches without a cover. And when our eldest daughter, Voulette, then a woman grown, remonstrated with him? He also beat her in the same fiendish manner, so that we both lay insensible, and we were confined to our beds for several days thereafter. The defendant is a most notorious profil get and desolute man, in the constant habit of seducing all his female operatives, whom he implanted. in his establishments in this country and in Europe. Isaac offered to settle, and within a week of filing suit, Marianne accepted a deal. Isaac purchased her a fully furnished house to live in and gave her $500 up front with a promise to give her $50 a week for the rest of her life. Marianne's mows weren't over, however. Within a month of reaching the settlement, she fell in love with a man 20 years her junior and secretly married him. Six months later, after suffering a bad fall that made her fear for her life, she shared her secret with her daughter, Vouletti, who then passed on the information to her new husband, William Proctor, a longtime singer and employee. Proctor, aware that an important restructuring of the business was imminent, chose to be loyal to his boss rather than his mother-in-law, and informed Singer, who promptly accused Marianne of "bigamy" and forced her out of the home he had bought for her. Aside from an allowance to support her for unwed daughters, and a one-time payment of $3,000, half of which went to her lawyer, Marianne never received another dime from Isaac and never saw him again. But Isaac's legal woes weren't over. In 1863, Catherine reappeared, claiming that Singer and Clark had committed fraud in obtaining her agreement to a divorce. Isaac's first born son, William, by then also a singer-employee, testified that his father approached him to file an affidavit against his mother, bluntly telling him, "Take your choice, your mother with poverty or me, with riches." And when William declined, at this, Mr. Singer became violently angry, said I was the wickedest of men and the silliest of folks, and threatened to murder me. Isaac ultimately prevailed over Catherine, as he had over Marianne, but the end of his relationships with them also triggered the end of his relationship with Edward Clark and with the company that bore his name. Marianne's claim that Isaac's seduced his employees, terrified the conservative Clark, who wrote Singer to complain. "I hardly dare to speak to any old friends when I meet them in the streets. The firm of which I am the active manager has been publicly accused of keeping numerous agents in various cities to procure women for you to prostitute. And although this is an infamous falsehood, yet it is mixed up with so much truth that it would be disgraceful to bring into light of a public trial." "Just as bad, or maybe worse, with the civil war raging, Clark complained that Singer's notoriety was costing Clark money." "I am suffering for all the large public show of wealth you made. It was industriously spread abroad that the firm was rich. Now all who are rich are expected to be patriotic and to give liberally. I'm called on many times a day to subscribe and I'm obliged to refuse." In June 1863, Clark was finally able to use Singer's marital troubles to push him into retirement. The IM-Singer & Company partnership was converted into a new corporation and renamed the Singer Manufacturing Company with singer and Clark splitting 83% of its shares between the two of them. Singer peevishly refused to let Clark become president, so a clerk named Insley Hopper was named instead. But Clark would remain the de facto leader of the new company and would return as president after Singer's death a dozen years later. Singer marked his June 1863 retirement with another milestone, marrying for the second official time. This time to a half-English, half-French beauty, 30 years his junior, named Isabella Ujani Boyer, whom he had met when he stayed at a little hotel run by her widowed mother in Paris. The rumor was that the mother first made an effort to seduce the now single American tycoon herself, but was eventually content to encourage him to take up with her daughter, even though she was apparently married at the time. One month after the wedding, their first born son was born, and the new Singer family took up residence at an estate in Yonkers, north of New York City. Though they remained social pariahs, Singer slowly rebuilt his family life. He had had to search for his children by Mary McGonacol, who had fled to San Francisco soon after the initial burst of ugly publicity. But the combination of Singer's natural charm, with the charms of his young new wife, plus, of course, his immense wealth, enabled them to reestablish relationships with Isaac's illegitimate children, and they would go on to have six more children of their own together. But Isabella was homesick for Europe. So in 1867, the Singer family left the United States for the last time, first moving to Paris, and then when Prussia invaded France to London. Once again, the city's social elite remained close to them. So in 1871, they began the construction of a palatial new estate in rural southwestern England, which Singer would jokingly name the wigwam. He wouldn't live to see it completed, dying there in July 1875 at the age of 63, leaving an estate valued at around $13 million, one widow with six minor children, one ex-wife with two legitimate children, and three ex-mistresses with 14 adult children among them. Isaac's will, written in 1870, divided his estate into 60 equal shares, ultimately worth around $200,000 each. Well over half went to his widow Isabella and her six children. Each of their four sons received six shares. Their two sisters each got five shares, and Isabella herself got four, as well as lifetime use of the mansion, as long as she didn't remarry. In his will, Isaac openly acknowledged his illegitimate children, and left almost all of them smaller, but still substantial amounts. The five children of Mary McGonacall, and the daughter of Mary Walters, each got two shares, as did three of the children of Mary Ann's sponsor. The other four of Mary Ann's children received only one share. None of the mothers of the children got anything. He also left nothing from Mary Ann's daughter, Vouleti, and only slightly more than nothing for his oldest legitimate children, $10,000 for his daughter, Lillian, and a mere $500 for his son, William. Despite the large amounts of money involved, and the large cast of characters, the legal fights which ensued were surprisingly short-lived. William and Lillian were swaged by an offer to split $90,000, paid mostly out of the shares of the illegitimate children. Mary Ann's sponsor, however, once again chose to sue, making the remarkable contention that since she and Isaac had had a common law marriage which was never dissolved, she was in fact his legitimate widow, not Isabella, which would have allowed her to claim a third of the estate, but with the unfortunate side effect of making her a self-declared bigomest. This reignited interest in Singer's story, and the public followed with fascination the detailed court testimony about their years together. But Mary Ann could produce no marriage certificate to prove she was ever Mrs. Singer, and had not helped her case by saying she had never been married on the wedding certificate she did execute. Worse, even her own children declined to testify on her behalf. By the end of 1875, Mary Ann had lost, appealed, and lost again with the judge finally declaring that a concubine cannot acquire the rights of a wife by survivorship. Thus ended the history of Isaac Singer's estate, but not, of course, of his family. Almost seven decades later, in 1942, a fascinating three-part series appeared in Town and Country magazine called the Singer Saga, which offered a not always accurate, but fascinating view of Singer's legacy, only a year before the death of his last surviving child. By giving a history of what happened to Isaac Singer's 22 children after he had died. Ordinarily, when a man amasses enough money to leave real fortunes to a score of persons, he's likely to be remembered by them if not revered. But Isaac Merritt Singer has been pointedly ignored by his beneficiaries. He had 22 children of record, and they had 54 children of record, yet only one of the whole lot was named for him, and that grandchild simply disappeared to no one's apparent concern. Isaac Singer and his children were essentially ignorant, undisciplined, and socially unconstructive. Volgarity and stupidity were traits common to almost all of them. Most, like their father, were unprepared for wealth. It was not mere accident that if the 22 children who participated in their father's fortune, at least eight died bankrupt, or in a situation not far removed from poverty, they were pathetically inept in the management of their private lives. But ignorance and a lack of discipline were hardly impediments to entering European high society at that time, or today either. So it should come as no surprise that all six children of Singer's final marriage did so with varying degrees of success. His widow Isabella began the process by remarrying to become the Duchess of Campos Sanice, a title of highly questionable legitimacy according to Towning Country, and one that came at the cost of losing her right to inhabit the wigwam. Her eldest son eventually became Sir Adam, and two of her daughters also married title aristocrats, though also of questionable legitimacy. Isaac's most famous child was certainly Paris Singer, the fourth of his final batch of children, who lived a flamboyant lifestyle similar to his fathers, including a long and legendary affair with the actress Sarah Bernhardt, for whom he once tried to buy Madison Square Garden, and who returned the favor by writing about his prowess as a lover in her autobiography. But while Paris had the spending habits of his father, he didn't have the same level of wealth, or ability to make more, and so when he died in 1932, ironically in Paris, he was bankrupt. Not all of Singer's children's biographies were his dramatic, but it's safe to say that while Singer was an terrible father, he was generous and was loving with his children, as long as they did what he wanted them to do. He certainly wasn't a great role model for healthy relationships, and that showed in his children's lives. His 22 children married a total of 31 times, the majority of them mistakes, with 12 of those marriages, or 40% ending in divorce, a rather high percentage for that era, even among the rich. The point is, it would be a mistake to assume that just because Singer ended up leaving so much money to his children, he did so in order to help them. I'll talk in a moment about how he left his money, but first, let's just ask why did he leave so much money behind? Why didn't he spend the money himself before he died? After all, unlike our first four tycoons, Isaac Singer wasn't a particularly hard worker, he retired at age 52, and he liked spending money. He was maintaining three households in New York City in the early 1850s, even before the profits really started rolling in. But by the 1860s, the Singer Company had started earning so much money that even Isaac Singer had trouble spending it all. Consider that the entire cost of building his estate, the wigwam, came to around $500,000, an amount he would have earned in dividends in only two to three years. And then there's another even more important reason why when he died, he owned $7.3 million worth of stock in the Singer Manufacturing Company, almost two-thirds of the value of his total estate. And the reason is because he never, ever sold a single share, spending only the dividends. And it's pretty obvious why he did that, because he didn't want to allow his detested partner Edward Clark to take control of the business. He got more pleasure from holding onto those shares and maintaining equality with Clark than he would have from selling some and spending the money. So although it's true that Singer left large amounts of money to some of his progeny when he died, there's no reason to think that he accumulated that money because he wanted to help his children. It's just that, yeah, he couldn't take it with him. And what does the way he chose to split up his wealth, say about his preferences? Let's begin with the one child he excluded entirely from his will. Mary Anne's oldest daughter, Vouleti, was he trying to punish her? After all, according to her mother's testimony, Isaac had beat Vouleti insensible when she tried to intervene in their fight. Well, according to Town and Country, Vouleti had always been Isaac's favorite child. And indeed, in his will, Isaac himself offered a simple explanation for why he excluded her. He'd already helped her so much that she didn't need his money. Through my appointment, her husband obtained his situation and interest in the singer-manufacturing company and is thus acquired a fortune which places my daughter above the necessity of any assistance from me. Now, you may be surprised to hear this, but excluding Vouleti, his favorite daughter, was the one part of Singer's will that makes perfect sense to an economist. The logic is that $100 is more valuable to a poor person than it is to a rich one. So a parent who wants to help all their children equally should give more to those with less, or even nothing at all to a child who is already rich. In retrospect, Vouleti would certainly appear to have been Isaac's most successful child. She and her husband, William Proctor, were accepted into New York High Society and passed on wealth that continued through the lives of three children, three grandchildren, six great grandchildren, and dozens of descendants alive today. Singer's other choice is about how to split his estate, though. Clearly, had nothing to do with how rich his other children were, and thus have no obvious economic logic. But there is an obvious psychological logic. His true heirs, the sons from his final marriage, each got six shares while their sisters got five. His illegitimate children got two shares if they had behaved the way Singer had wanted, and one if they had not. And as for William and Lillian, well, it didn't matter that they were the oldest, or that they were legitimate, or that they had been abandoned by their father as children. They had supported their long, suffering mother over him, and so they got nothing. Now, you certainly might complain about the sexism of giving his sons six shares and his daughters only five. But it's worth pointing out, that's actually a pretty small difference in treatment for that time and place. And his illegitimate children don't seem to have been grouped by gender. And though his treatment of the women in his life was obviously horrendous, it's also worth pointing out, that the sewing machine did relieve women from uncountable hours of manual drudgery, and also enabled millions of women around the world to start their own small businesses of sewing for hire. No, it seems the more obvious charge to lay against Isaac Singer, is that by using the wealthy hadn't been able to use himself before he died, to reward his children for doing what he had wanted, we wouldn't therefore say that helping his children with Singer's primary goal. Which is why I can't really say I disagree much with town and country, that Isaac Singer's wealth left only a tainted legacy for his family. Unfortunately, there's perhaps no better symbol of that tainted legacy than how their 1942 profile treats poor William Singer Isaac's oldest legitimate son. The writer claims that William imitated his father's complicated family life, with 10 children by three different wives. Going on to say that one of his sons, also named Isaac Merritt Singer, quote, "disappeared in the West," and that later in life, William was quote, "secretive and evasive about his previous wives and children." What a fascinating story. What does "disappeared in the West" even mean? But there's a problem. All the genealogical records I could find on the internet indicate that William was only married once and had only four children. After considerable searching, I finally discovered an article from the New York Sun newspaper appearing in July 1884. Romeo Singer, a legitimate grandson of the late Isaac Singer, is a charity lunatic in the Ward's Island in St. Asylum. He's a boy of 18, the youngest of three sons born to William Singer and his wife. The middle child, a deaf mute, was trampling in the West seeking work, walking along the railroad, and was struck by a train. Well, there is no mention of that deaf mute son's name. It is crystal clear that this article was the origin of the story repeated 60 years later by town and country. But was it true? I found Romeo's family in census records, but no sign of a connection to William, nor of another Isaac Singer. So, the sole source of the claim seems to have been a young man in an insane asylum. No, I don't think it's true at all, and I don't think it's any wonder that William, who is age 50 when that story appeared in the Sun, and would live another 30 years, became secretive and evasive. Of course, if not from Mary Ann's explosion on Fifth Avenue in August of 1860, there might have been little to no record of the events I've shared with you. So, I certainly can't prove that the story about William Singer is false. But I'm reminded of Edward Clark's complaint that he could not help but be involved when his partner Isaac's personal life was first made public. Although this is an infamous falsehood, yet it is mixed up with so much truth, that I think is Isaac's legacy. He lived life his own way and didn't really care about the consequences for the people, and particularly the women around him. He loved his children, but there's certainly not why he made his fortune, or left so much of it behind. Next episode, the story of Charles Lewis Tiffany and his older son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who uncomfortably was forced to ask the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" You can't take it with you was produced and engineered by Jim Latham, vocal acting by Sean Brandy, Jackie Bennett, Mark De Carlo, Elaine Dalton, Kai Corbin, James Latham, and Andrew Leeman. If you're interested in learning more about this story, I recommend Ruth Branden's book, Singer and the Sewing Machine, a capitalist romance.