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...