William Lee's stocking-frame patent applications

William Lee's stocking-frame patent applications mark a revealing early collision between invention and political authority. Lee devised a machine to mechanize knitting, but both Elizabeth I and her successor James I refused him a patent: they feared the unemployment and instability the machine might bring. The episode illustrates the book’s argument that innovation can promise greater productivity while threatening the established interests and power that might permit it.

From Hand Knitting to a Machine

In 1583, after studying at the University of Cambridge, Lee returned to become the local priest in Calverton, England. Elizabeth I had recently ruled that her subjects should wear knitted caps. Lee saw how slowly knitters made them: his mother and sisters spent their evenings working with needles. He reasoned that if two needles could make a garment, several needles might take up the thread at once.

The idea became an obsession. Lee neglected his duties to the Church and his family as he worked toward a machine that could free people from the long labor of hand knitting. In 1589, his stocking frame was ready. It promised to mechanize the production of stockings and increase productivity, but it also raised the prospect that workers using the old method would lose their employment.

The Patent Appeals

Lee went to London to seek an audience with Elizabeth I and a patent that would prevent others from copying his design. He rented a building to set up the machine, 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 stated concern was that mechanized production would deprive her subjects of work and leave them beggars. The refusal defeated Lee’s hopes in England, and he moved to France to try there. When that effort also failed, he returned to England and appealed to Elizabeth’s successor, James I. James refused him as well, on the same grounds.

Innovation and Political Power

The two refusals reveal that the dispute was not simply about whether the machine worked or whether it could make stockings faster. The stocking frame promised a productivity gain, but its adoption could disrupt the livelihoods of hand-knitters and generate political instability. The book’s account distinguishes that public justification from the rulers’ deeper concern: displaced workers might become a political threat, and unrest might endanger royal power.

The episode thus makes visible the conflict embedded in creative destruction. New technology can make society more prosperous, but doing so often means displacing established ways of working and undermining the privileges attached to them. Lee’s machine stood at that crossing: a device for producing more, and a prospective source of loss for those whose work and authority depended on the old arrangement.

Significance in the Book’s Argument

The case is used to explain why invention alone does not guarantee sustained economic growth. Political institutions shape economic rules and incentives, including whether people can introduce new technologies and whether rulers can block them. Where political power is concentrated and lightly constrained, elites may use that power to preserve economic arrangements that benefit them; those arrangements can in turn strengthen their political dominance.

The broader argument is a self-reinforcing one: extractive political institutions allow elites to shape economic institutions with few checks, while the wealth produced by extractive economic institutions helps those elites retain power. Lee’s failed appeals provide a compact illustration of the barrier that political interests can pose to innovation. The machine’s promise was not enough; its fate depended on rulers who feared the consequences of allowing it to transform work.