Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

Calverton, near Nottingham; and it is alleged by some

writers that the invention had its origin in disappointed

affection. The curate is said to have fallen deeply in love with a

young lady of the village, who failed to reciprocate his

affections; and when he visited her, she was accustomed to pay much

more attention to the process of knitting stockings and instructing

her pupils in the art, than to the addresses of her admirer. This

slight is said to have created in his mind such an aversion to

knitting by hand, that he formed the determination to invent a

machine that should supersede it and render it a gainless

employment. For three years he devoted himself to the prosecution

of the invention, sacrificing everything to his new idea. At the

prospect of success opened before him, he abandoned his curacy, and

devoted himself to the art of stocking making by machinery. This

is the version of the story given by Henson {7} on the authority of

an old stocking-maker, who died in Collins’s Hospital, Nottingham,

aged ninety-two, and was apprenticed in the town during the reign

of Queen Anne. It is also given by Deering and Blackner as the

traditional account in the neighbourhood, and it is in some measure

borne out by the arms of the London Company of Frame-Work Knitters,

which consists of a stocking frame without the wood-work, with a

clergyman on one side and a woman on the other as supporters. {8}

 

Whatever may have been the actual facts as to the origin of the

invention of the Stocking Loom, there can be no doubt as to the

extraordinary mechanical genius displayed by its inventor. That a

clergyman living in a remote village, whose life had for the most

part been spent with books, should contrive a machine of such

delicate and complicated movements, and at once advance the art of

knitting from the tedious process of linking threads in a chain of

loops by three skewers in the fingers of a woman, to the beautiful

and rapid process of weaving by the stocking frame, was indeed an

astonishing achievement, which may be pronounced almost unequalled

in the history of mechanical invention. Lee’s merit was all the

greater, as the handicraft arts were then in their infancy, and

little attention had as yet been given to the contrivance of

machinery for the purposes of manufacture. He was under the

necessity of extemporising the parts of his machine as he best

could, and adopting various expedients to overcome difficulties as

they arose. His tools were imperfect, and his materials imperfect;

and he had no skilled workmen to assist him. According to

tradition, the first frame he made was a twelve gauge, without lead

sinkers, and it was almost wholly of wood; the needles being also

stuck in bits of wood. One of Lee’s principal difficulties

consisted in the formation of the stitch, for want of needle eyes;

but this he eventually overcame by forming eyes to the needles with

a three-square file. {9} At length, one difficulty after another

was successfully overcome, and after three years’ labour the

machine was sufficiently complete to be fit for use. The quondam

curate, full of enthusiasm for his art, now began stocking weaving

in the village of Calverton, and he continued to work there for

several years, instructing his brother James and several of his

relations in the practice of the art.

 

Having brought his frame to a considerable degree of perfection,

and being desirous of securing the patronage of Queen Elizabeth,

whose partiality for knitted silk stockings was well known, Lee

proceeded to London to exhibit the loom before her Majesty. He

first showed it to several members of the court, among others to

Sir William (afterwards Lord) Hunsdon, whom he taught to work it

with success; and Lee was, through their instrumentality, at length

admitted to an interview with the Queen, and worked the machine in

her presence. Elizabeth, however, did not give him the

encouragement that he had expected; and she is said to have opposed

the invention on the ground that it was calculated to deprive a

large number of poor people of their employment of hand knitting.

Lee was no more successful in finding other patrons, and

considering himself and his invention treated with contempt, he

embraced the offer made to him by Sully, the sagacious minister of

Henry IV., to proceed to Rouen and instruct the operatives of that

town—then one of the most important manufacturing centres of

France—in the construction and use of the stocking-frame. Lee

accordingly transferred himself and his machines to France, in

1605, taking with him his brother and seven workmen. He met with a

cordial reception at Rouen, and was proceeding with the manufacture

of stockings on a large scale—having nine of his frames in full

work,—when unhappily ill fortune again overtook him. Henry IV.,

his protector, on whom he had relied for the rewards, honours, and

promised grant of privileges, which had induced Lee to settle in

France, was murdered by the fanatic Ravaillac; and the

encouragement and protection which had heretofore been extended to

him were at once withdrawn. To press his claims at court, Lee

proceeded to Paris; but being a protestant as well as a foreigner,

his representations were treated with neglect; and worn out with

vexation and grief, this distinguished inventor shortly after died

at Paris, in a state of extreme poverty and distress.

 

Lee’s brother, with seven of the workmen, succeeded in escaping

from France with their frames, leaving two behind. On James Lee’s

return to Nottinghamshire, he was joined by one Ashton, a miller of

Thoroton, who had been instructed in the art of frame-work knitting

by the inventor himself before he left England. These two, with

the workmen and their frames, began the stocking manufacture at

Thoroton, and carried it on with considerable success. The place

was favourably situated for the purpose, as the sheep pastured in

the neighbouring district of Sherwood yielded a kind of wool of the

longest staple. Ashton is said to have introduced the method of

making the frames with lead sinkers, which was a great improvement.

The number of looms employed in different parts of England

gradually increased; and the machine manufacture of stockings

eventually became an important branch of the national industry.

 

One of the most important modifications in the Stocking-Frame was

that which enabled it to be applied to the manufacture of lace on a

large scale. In 1777, two workmen, Frost and Holmes, were both

engaged in making point-net by means of the modifications they had

introduced in the stocking-frame; and in the course of about thirty

years, so rapid was the growth of this branch of production that

1500 point-net frames were at work, giving employment to upwards of

15,000 people. Owing, however, to the war, to change of fashion,

and to other circumstances, the Nottingham lace manufacture rapidly

fell off; and it continued in a decaying state until the invention

of the Bobbin-net Machine by John Heathcoat, late M.P. for

Tiverton, which had the effect of at once re-establishing the

manufacture on solid foundations.

 

John Heathcoat was the youngest son of a respectable small farmer

at Duffield, Derbyshire, where he was born in 1783. When at school

he made steady and rapid progress, but was early removed from it to

be apprenticed to a frame-smith near Loughborough. The boy soon

learnt to handle tools with dexterity, and he acquired a minute

knowledge of the parts of which the stocking-frame was composed, as

well as of the more intricate warp-machine. At his leisure he

studied how to introduce improvements in them, and his friend, Mr.

Bazley, M.P., states that as early as the age of sixteen, he

conceived the idea of inventing a machine by which lace might be

made similar to Buckingham or French lace, then all made by hand.

The first practical improvement he succeeded in introducing was in

the warp-frame, when, by means of an ingenious apparatus, he

succeeded in producing “mitts” of a lacy appearance, and it was

this success which determined him to pursue the study of mechanical

lace-making. The stocking-frame had already, in a modified form,

been applied to the manufacture of point-net lace, in which the

mesh was LOOPED as in a stocking, but the work was slight and

frail, and therefore unsatisfactory. Many ingenious Nottingham

mechanics had, during a long succession of years, been labouring at

the problem of inventing a machine by which the mesh of threads

should be TWISTED round each other on the formation of the net.

Some of these men died in poverty, some were driven insane, and all

alike failed in the object of their search. The old warp-machine

held its ground.

 

When a little over twenty-one years of age, Heathcoat went to

Nottingham, where he readily found employment, for which he soon

received the highest remuneration, as a setter-up of hosiery and

warp-frames, and was much respected for his talent for invention,

general intelligence, and the sound and sober principles that

governed his conduct. He also continued to pursue the subject on

which his mind had before been occupied, and laboured to compass

the contrivance of a twist traverse-net machine. He first studied

the art of making the Buckingham or pillow-lace by hand, with the

object of effecting the same motions by mechanical means. It was a

long and laborious task, requiring the exercise of great

perseverance and ingenuity. His master, Elliot, described him at

that time as inventive, patient, self-denying, and taciturn,

undaunted by failures and mistakes, full of resources and

expedients, and entertaining the most perfect confidence that his

application of mechanical principles would eventually be crowned

with success.

 

It is difficult to describe in words an invention so complicated as

the bobbin-net machine. It was, indeed, a mechanical pillow for

making lace, imitating in an ingenious manner the motions of the

lace-maker’s fingers in intersecting or tying the meshes of the

lace upon her pillow. On analysing the component parts of a piece

of hand-made lace, Heathcoat was enabled to classify the threads

into longitudinal and diagonal. He began his experiments by fixing

common pack-threads lengthwise on a sort of frame for the warp, and

then passing the weft threads between them by common plyers,

delivering them to other plyers on the opposite side; then, after

giving them a sideways motion and twist, the threads were repassed

back between the next adjoining cords, the meshes being thus tied

in the same way as upon pillows by hand. He had then to contrive a

mechanism that should accomplish all these nice and delicate

movements, and to do this cost him no small amount of mental toil.

Long after he said, “The single difficulty of getting the diagonal

threads to twist in the allotted space was so great that if it had

now to be done, I should probably not attempt its accomplishment.”

His next step was to provide thin metallic discs, to be used as

bobbins for conducting the threads backwards and forwards through

the warp. These discs, being arranged in carrier-frames placed on

each side of the warp, were moved by suitable machinery so as to

conduct the threads from side to side in forming the lace. He

eventually succeeded in working out his principle with

extraordinary skill and success; and, at the age of twenty-four, he

was enabled to secure his invention by a patent.

 

During this time his wife was kept in almost as great anxiety as

himself, for she well knew of his trials and difficulties while he

was striving to perfect his invention. Many years after they had

been successfully overcome, the conversation which took place one

eventful evening was vividly remembered. “Well,” said the anxious

wife, “will it work?” “No,” was the sad answer; “I have had to

take it all to pieces again.” Though he could still speak

hopefully and