Li's sock machine

William Lee’s stocking frame was an early knitting machine whose promise of faster production brought it into conflict with the political order it might have transformed. Developed after Lee watched his mother and sisters knit by hand, it offered a way to multiply the needles working a thread; when he sought royal patents, Elizabeth I and James I refused, fearing that the machine would displace workers and destabilize their rule. The episode illustrates the book’s argument that creative destruction can make sustained growth possible while provoking resistance from those who stand to lose economically or politically.

Origin and Design

In 1583, after studying at the University of Cambridge, Lee returned to Calverton, England, to become the local priest. Elizabeth I had recently ruled that her subjects should wear knitted caps. Hand-knitters were the only means of making them, but production was slow. Lee watched his mother and sisters work by needle in the evening and reasoned that if two needles could make a garment, several might take up the thread at once. That practical observation became the starting point for mechanizing textile production.

Lee’s project grew into an obsession. He said that his duties to Church and family began to suffer as the idea of the machine and its creation occupied his mind. The stocking frame was not simply a faster way to complete a familiar task: it proposed to reorganize how knitting was done, shifting work from the hands of individual knitters to a machine capable of producing stockings more efficiently.

The Patent Rejections

By 1589, Lee’s stocking frame was ready. He went to London hoping to show Elizabeth I the machine’s usefulness and obtain a patent that would prevent others from copying its design. He rented a building in which to set it up and, with help from his local member of Parliament, Richard Parkyns, met Henry Carey, Lord Hundson, a member of the Queen’s Privy Council. Carey arranged for the Queen to see the invention.

Elizabeth refused the patent. Her objection was not that the frame failed to work; she feared its success would deprive people of employment and leave them destitute. Lee, crushed by the refusal, moved to France to try his luck there. When that attempt also failed, he returned to England and petitioned Elizabeth’s successor, James I. James likewise denied him a patent on the same grounds. The repeated refusals kept the machine from receiving royal protection, despite its promise of much greater productivity.

Innovation and Political Resistance

The frame exposed a conflict between technological improvement and the interests bound up in existing work. Hand-knitters could lose their livelihoods if a machine displaced their labor. But the book stresses that the monarchs’ decisive concern was political as well as economic: they feared that unemployment could produce instability and threaten royal power. An invention that altered production might therefore alter the balance of power, too.

Lee’s case also clarifies why the book treats creative destruction as a central condition of sustained economic growth. New technology can make society more prosperous, but it does so by replacing old methods and disrupting the privileges and livelihoods built around them. Innovations often come from newcomers rather than established beneficiaries of the existing order; those with power to lose may resist the change rather than introduce it themselves. The frame thus represents both the productive promise of mechanization and the social conflict contained within that promise.

Historical Significance

The refusal to patent Lee’s machine is presented as an illustration of a broader historical pattern: extractive institutions could sometimes support economic growth, especially when they included limited elements of inclusion, but they did not permit creative destruction to proceed freely. Such growth was not sustained. It could end because new innovation was blocked, because political conflict grew out of competition to extract benefits, or because inclusive elements were reversed.

The episode also marks a contrast with later developments in England. The book links resistance to radical innovation with the long absence of sustained improvements in living standards and places the emergence of change in England at the center of the chapter that follows. Lee’s frame did not by itself produce that transformation; its importance lies in making the barriers visible. A machine capable of raising productivity could be stopped not only by those whose work it threatened, but by rulers who feared the political consequences of their displacement.