Needle

Needle

A needle is a filament of metal, copper, or other hard material, relatively small in size, usually straight, sharpened at one end and finished in one eye or handle to insert a thread. It has been used since prehistoric times for sewing.

The sewing needle has a confirmed antiquity of at least 40,000 years, but could have an antiquity of more than 60,000 since a small tip of bone sculpted during the Middle Palaeolithic of the African continent could correspond to the tip of a sewing needle. The tip was found in 2006 in the Sibudu cave in South Africa and has been dated more than 61,000 years ago.

Confirmation that this is actually a sewing needle has not yet been obtained. The oldest confirmed sewing needle known to date was discovered in the 20th century by the Slovenian archaeologist Srečko Brodar (1893 - 1987) in the Potok Cave, located in the east of the Karavanke Mountains in Slovenia, and is about 41,000 years old.

Later, during the Upper Palaeolithic, in Europe, bone-sculpted sewing needles became common in the solutrense (approximately 22,000 to 17,000 years "AP", i.e., "before the present") and Magdalenian (approximately 17,000 to 12,000 years AP) periods.

Much later, with the discovery of metals, sewing needles began to be made first with copper, in Anatolia, about 5,500 years ago. C., and later with bronze and iron. It is believed that about a thousand years ago the Chinese, during the Middle Ages, were the first to use steel needles, and that the Arabs were responsible for bringing steel to Europe. Already in 1730 there were important needle manufacturers in Nuremberg (Germany), and during the reign of Elizabeth I of England there were already many needle manufacturers in England. From prehistory until the 19th century, needles with an eye (a hole called "hondón") were still made by hand, as in prehistory and as in all previous ages. The first mass-produced metal eye needles came on the market in 1826, but it was not until 1885 that machinery was arranged to stamp the eye well on the needle. Sewing machine needles, similar to a normal needle, but with the eye at the bottom of the needle, were later disclosed.