Elias Howe spends fourteen years failing to perfect the sewing machine, until his wife, facing real desperation, invents it herself in two hours; he takes out the patent in his own name regardless. A West Virginia woman similarly solves the mowing and reaping mechanism, nailing shears to a board after her husband and father-in-law give up, though the patent again goes to a man, McCormick. Conwell uses both stories to argue that true greatness is common, plain, and almost always unrecognized, illustrated by a visit to General Garfield's house where a neighbor simply shouts 'Jim!' at the back door to fetch one of the nation's most significant men.
Conwell then tells his own story of walking, terrified, into Abraham Lincoln's White House office to plead for the life of a soldier sentenced to death. Lincoln, absorbed completely in his paperwork until he finishes it, then gives Conwell his full attention, answers the request plainly, reassures him the boy will not be executed, and chats about farming in the Berkshire Hills as though speaking to an old neighbor. Conwell states Lincoln's whole secret for greatness in one rule: whatever he was doing, he gave it his entire mind until it was finished.
The chapter closes with Conwell later seeing Lincoln's body lying in the East Room after the assassination, and again at the second funeral in Springfield, where Lincoln's own hometown neighbors, standing around the tomb, still call him only 'Old Abe,' the same plain name they always used.
Coming Up in Chapter 9
A Massachusetts nail-worker injured on the job invents the mechanism behind the modern safety pin using nothing but a stick and a rubber band, right before Conwell turns his full attention to why he believes Philadelphia keeps talking itself out of its own greatness.
