Mme. Kellogg's French Tailor's System - Battle Creek, MI - 1883
Sleeve and Dart Rule
The Kellogg French Tailor System
Pat. Dec. 25, 1883
Mme Kellogg, Inventor and Patentee, Battle Creek, MI

This patent was produced as "Mme. Kellogg's French Tailor's System".  The actual inventor was a man named Francis "Frank" Jonas Kellogg from Battle Creek MI.  Apparently he felt the tool would sell better to seamstresses if it had a woman's name on it.  Francis married Minnie L. Hebb in 1894, more than a decade after "Mme. Kellogg" invented her system.  Maybe his mother, Sophia H. Tewksbury (1821 - 1906), was the brains behind the brawn.  Francis was brazen enough to include an illustration of "The Inventor" in the front pages of his tailor system.

"Professor" Francis Jonas Kellogg's was a well-known huckster and purveyor of patent medicines such as Sanitone Wafers, Malto-Fructo, and Rengo.  He was no relation to the Kellogg bothers that ran the famous Battle Creek sanitarium (and went on to form a cereal empire), but apparently used the name and location to lend legitimacy to his medicine business.

Source: Directory of American Tool and Machinery Parts

Instruction Book for the Kellogg French Tailor System for Cutting Every Description of Ladies' Garments
- Mrs. F. J. Kellogg Battle Creek, MI -  c. 1892.

Miss Sophie A. Nickerson Scientific Dress Cutting School - Providence, RI

Scientific Tailor System of Dress-Cutting
Miss S. A. Nickerson, Inventor
Providence, R.I.  1889

Unlike Frank J. Kellogg, Miss Sophie A. Nickerson was an actual seamstress, who operated a dress making school in Providence, RI. during the late 19th c. 

I've been unable to find more of her personal history to share how she came to open her business and develop her patterning system.  She lived in Providence the rest of her life and never married.  In the 1920 Census, at the age of 62, she is listed as an "Ostrich Feather Dresser".
Brisé fan with ostrich feathers, early 1900s -RISD, Beauty in Hand Exhibit
The Providence Directory, July1, 1885
"Artistic Dress Cutting - Miss Sophie A. Nickerson -
Improved Tailor System of Artistic Dress Cutting -
91 Westminster St.. Providence, RI"
91 Westminster St.. Providence, RI was occupied by Wm Barstow's carpetings, floor oil cloths, and upholstery goods, before Sophie transformed it into her dress cutting school.


Cutting a Fashionable Fit: Dressmakers' Drafting
Systems in the U.S.
by claudia bruch kidwell

(Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology, no. 42, 1979) 
Click on the book for a free PDF
copy of the book from the Smithsonian
Mrs. H. A. Ross Tailor System - Battle Creek, MI

Mrs. Harry A. Ross - Instructions for Using Mrs. Ross' Tailor System, for Cutting Ladies' and Children's Garments of All Kinds, Battle Creek, MI.  1882.   

The Ross Tailor System of Garment Cutting by Actual Measurements, Battle Creek, MI.  1887.

Source:  Cutting for All: The Sartorial Arts, Related Crafts, & the Commercial Paper Pattern, Kevin L. Seligman, 1996, p. 75
Mrs. Harry A. Ross, a.k.a. Clara Sylvia Matthews (1855 - 1919), is listed as "keeping house", and Harry is listed as a "moulder" in several census records.  Maybe this was a husband and wife collaborative effort, or, maybe,Harry was following Frank Kellogg's lead.
Source:  Cutting a Fashionable Fit: Dressmakers' Drafting
Systems in the U.S. - Claudia Bruch Kidwell

Samuel T. Taylor Co. Dressmaking School - 930 Broadway, New York, NY
Harper's Bazaar, Volume 20, p. 644, 1887


“S.T. Taylor, Importer of French Fashion Journals and Paris Patterns, also Proprietor of the Art of Dress- Cutting, is one of the celebrated and worthy business men of the great metropolis.  S. T. Taylor’s business has now been established in this city for the last thirty-six years.  S.T. Taylor is the inventor and sole proprietor of the only system of dress-cutting this is not a chart, and which is the only perfect system of actual measurement in existence.  It has become recognized as such all through America, and though ignorant pretenders and unprincipled imitators have sought to impose their own worthless systems upon the public, yet wherever S.T. Taylor’s system is once tried all others are discarded.

S.T. Taylor is the sole importer of the four leading fashion journals of the world: Revue de la Mode, Le Bon Ton and Le Moniteur de la Mode, Le Monde Elegant, and La Modiste Universelle.  The first three are mainly devoted to the interests of dressmakers, and the latter to milliners.”

Excerpt from: New York's Great Industries: Exchange and Commercial Review, Richard Edwards, 1884, p. 261

Source:  Cutting a Fashionable Fit: Dressmakers' Drafting
Systems in the U.S. - Claudia Bruch Kidwell, p. 54.