William Lee and the Stocking Knitting Frame: Micro- and Macroinventions
Overview
Some technological inventions can be explained by the societal conditions in which they emerge, since they clearly meet an existing societal need. Historians call these gradual changes in techniques microinventions, trial and error tinkering that usually resulted from an intentional search for improvements and can be explained by economic theories—as ways to improve production, lower costs, or use less labor. However, macroinventions are more difficult to explain, because they seem to be the result of individual genius and luck more than economic forces. They seem to come out of nowhere, because they bring to bear seemingly unrelated ideas that just happen to produce a totally new solution. The invention of the stocking knitting frame by William Lee is one such invention.
Background
Stockings, or hose, were universally worn in Tudor England instead of trousers or pants, being tied to the bottom of the pantaloons (hence the word pants), as we can see from any picture of Tudor men's clothing. Tudor women wore stockings under their long skirts. The vast majority wore woolen stockings, either cut from cloth and seamed up the back of the leg, or knitted by hand as with modern hand-knitted sweaters.
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