William Lee

William Lee (1563–1614) was an English inventor and alleged clergyman who invented the stocking frame knitting machine. Framework knitting, as the use of Lee's machine in stocking production was called, was the first major stage in the mechanisation of the textile industry, a process that 200 years later precipitated the Industrial Revolution.

Life and legend

Some say Lee was born in Sussex, but others claim the Nottinghamshire villages of Calverton or Woodborough. No definitive evidence has been found for either of these although there is circumstantial support for Nottinghamshire. He entered Christ's College, Cambridge in 1579 as a sizar and graduated from St. John's College in 1582.

Stocking frame knitting machine

The following popular stories surrounding Lee and the stocking frame are rejected by modern scholarship. Lee was a curate at Calverton when he is said to have developed the machine because a woman whom he was courting showed more interest in knitting than in him (or alternatively that his wife was a very slow knitter). His first machine produced a coarse wool, for stockings. Refused a patent by Queen Elizabeth I, he built an improved machine that increased the number of needles per inch from 8 to 20 and produced a silk of finer texture, but the queen again denied him a patent because of her concern for the employment security of the kingdom's many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened by such mechanization. The queen said to Lee: "Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars." Supposedly, the Queen’s concern was a manifestation of the hosiers’ guilds' fear that the invention would make the skills of its artisan members obsolete. This alleged account of events does not appear until the 19th century and, as such, is dismissed by modern historians.