William Lee(c. 1563–c. 1614)

William Lee was born at Calverton, a small village seven miles north of Nottingham in the Sherwood Forest country, around 1563, son of a small Nottinghamshire yeoman family. He was schooled at the local grammar, took the BA at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1582 or 1583, was ordained in the Church of England, took the small Calverton curacy in his native village around 1586, and held it for the rest of his English career. The income was small; he supplemented it by hand-knitting hosiery for the local market in the long Nottinghamshire winters, the trade his wife also worked at.

The standard hosiery production of the 1580s was hand-knitting on two needles, a craft that produced one stocking in roughly a week of skilled labour. Lee, watching his wife knit at the cottage hearth, set out around 1586 in his twenty-third year to mechanise the process. He worked for three years on the prototype at his Calverton workshop. The completed machine, finished in 1589, was a wooden frame mounted on a treadle-and-bar carriage, with two hundred and fifty-six steel needles arranged in a single horizontal bar, each needle moved independently by a sinker that drew the yarn down and looped it through the previous row; the operator worked the bar with a horizontal lever and the treadle with the foot, producing through the coordinated action a full-width row of knitted loops in a single stroke. The completed machine produced a pair of coarse worsted stockings in twenty-four hours, against the hundred and forty hours of the hand-knit equivalent, an eightyfold productivity gain.

He took the prototype frame to London in 1589 to seek the royal patent from Elizabeth I that would permit him to set up production. The Queen, by Lee's own subsequent account, refused the patent on the ground that the machine would put hand-knitters out of work (the standard mercantilist objection of the period to labour-saving innovation), although she allowed him to demonstrate the machine at Greenwich Palace and made personal use of the worsted stockings he produced for her. He continued the work, improved the machine through the 1590s to a sixteenth-gauge silk-stocking version, applied again to James I in 1603 for the patent, and was again refused on the same hand-knitters'-livelihood ground.

In 1605 he accepted the invitation of King Henri IV of France to bring the manufacture to Rouen under French royal patronage, took with him nine of his own workmen including his brother James, set up the first frame-knitting factory in Europe at Rouen on royal subsidy, and operated the factory under the protection of the King's brother-in-law the Duke of Sully. On the assassination of Henri IV in May 1610 the French royal protection lapsed, and Lee died at Paris in poverty around 1614 in his fifty-first year. His brother James and the seven surviving workmen returned to Nottinghamshire with the surviving frames in 1615; the East Midlands hosiery industry that the imported frames founded ran continuously at Nottingham, Leicester and Derby for the next four centuries.

Within a hundred and fifty years the stocking-frame industry of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire was operating over twenty-five thousand frames and employing some hundred and ten thousand framework knitters, the largest single textile-machinery industry in pre-Arkwright England. The frame remained substantially unchanged from Lee's 1589 design until the late nineteenth-century introduction of the Cotton's Patent fully-fashioned machine; the surviving Lee frames are held at the Knitting Industry Museum at Calverton (in the village of his birth and invention, where the central single hand-frame from his workshop is preserved). The stocking frame was the foundational textile machine of the first Industrial Revolution and was the technological platform on which Richard Arkwright and James Hargreaves built the spinning-jenny and water-frame of the 1760s and 1770s. The Lee name in modern industrial history carries the weight of the Calverton workshop of 1586 to 1589.