Isaac Singer made a fortune as the co-founder of the Singer Manufacturing Company, whose sewing machines relieved millions of women from the interminable drudgery of hand-sewing clothes, and allowed many of them to start their own small businesses of sewing for hire.  But the women in his personal life  didn't fare so well: in his will he left nothing to four of the five mothers of his twenty-two children, and he stiffed three of the children as well.