Envelope Folding Machine

Hawes claims a sequence, not a shape: self-feed, crimp, four blades at staggered heights, paste, press. Write those five stages down — you will build them in order.

Cut one 200 mm square of paper. Mark a 100 mm square centred inside it. The four outer strips are the flaps.

Fold all four flaps by hand. Time one envelope with the stopwatch. This is the baseline Hawes was competing against.

Cut a 100 mm square of corrugated cardboard. This is the former the blank wraps around.

Glue the 100 mm former centrally onto the wooden board. Let it set 10 minutes.

Cut four cardboard strips 100 × 30 mm. These are Hawes's four blades, one per side.

Glue a card spacer under each blade: 0 mm, 3 mm, 6 mm, 9 mm. This staggering is the patent's core mechanical idea — the flaps must arrive in sequence.

Tape or wire each blade so it pivots down onto the former. Check each swings freely.

Centre one blank over the former, printed side down.

Press the blades down from lowest to highest. Each flap folds over the one before it.

Brush a 5 mm line of glue along the final flap and close it. Hawes used ratchet-driven paste rollers to do exactly this.

Time one envelope through your jig. Compare with your hand-folded time from step 3.

Fold ten envelopes. Measure the finished width of each with the ruler and record the spread. Consistency, not speed, is what a machine actually sells.

Now close the blades in the wrong order — highest first. Observe the jam. This is why the staggered heights are claimed.

US 9,812, “Envelop-folding machine”, R. L. Hawes of Worcester, Massachusetts, granted 21 June 1853.

Hawes trained and practised as a physician before leaving medicine for Goddard, Rice & Co., where he designed papermaking machinery. His envelope machine was the first commercially successful one in the United States, turning out 10,000–12,500 envelopes per day where a skilled hand folder managed a few hundred.

His specific contribution over earlier designs was the self-feeding device that picked up blanks automatically. That cut the number of human attendants a machine needed and set the pattern later used in self-gumming plunger machines.

A note on the record. Google Patents lists the filing date for US 9,812 as the same day as the grant, 21 June 1853. That is a cataloguing artefact of very early patents, not a real same-day filing — this blueprint therefore cites the grant date only. The same problem affects several 1830s–1890s patents, including Lanston's Monotype in this very batch.

The envelope itself was a newer idea than most people assume. Pre-gummed, mass-produced envelopes only became normal once machines like this made them cheap; before that, a letter was commonly folded and sealed with wax, the sheet acting as its own wrapper.