The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. Machine breaking in France was at least as frequent, and probably even more consequential, though it can be hard to tease out whether the phenomenon contributed to, or was a symptom of, some of the uglier aspects of the French Revolution. Normandy in particular,58 which was not only close to England but the most “English” region of France, was the site of dozens of incidents in 1789 alone. In July, hundreds of spinning jennys were destroyed, along with a French version of Arkwright’s water frame. In October, an attorney in Rouen applauded the destruction of “the machines used in cotton-spinning59 that have deprived many workers of their jobs.” In Troyes, spinners rioted, killing the mayor and mutilating his body because “he had favored machines.”60 The carders of Lille destroyed machines in 1790; in 1791, the spinning jennies of Roanne were hacked up and burned. By 1796, administrators in the Department of the Somme were complaining, it turns out presciently, that the “prejudice against machinery61 has led the commercial classes … to abandon their interest in the cotton industry.”

  The Luddite version of machine breaking—what the historian E. J. Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot”62—was the product of half a dozen different but related historical threads. One was surely the Napoleonic Wars, which had been under way more or less continuously for more than fifteen years by the time of the first Luddite activity. The war economy had affected the textile industry of the Midlands no less than the shipbuilders of Portsmouth, first with dramatic increases in demand for sailcloth and uniforms, and then—as Napoleon’s so-called “Continental System” restricted British trade with the Americas and Europe—with equally dramatic decreases in exports, which fell by nearly a third from 1810 to 1811.

  Bad enough to be a manufacturer in such times; far worse to be a laborer. Handloom weavers had been earning63 nearly twenty shillings a week in the 1790s; twenty years later, mostly because of the large number of new entrants to the industry, they were now earning less than ten. Factory workers were paid better, but the conditions in which they worked could be much worse: lung-destroying cotton dust everywhere, and noise so loud that workers were obliged to invent a method of lip-reading (known in Lancashire as “mee-mawing”64).

  Many were nonetheless driven to factory work by the dramatic increase in the amount of rural land removed from the commons—the so-called “enclosure” movement by which more than six million acres of fields, meadows, and forests representing more than half of all the land then in cultivation in England65 were hedged, fenced, and turned into private property between 1770 and 1830. Enclosure was bad enough; in combination with war-fueled inflation, it doubled the price of food: a loaf of bread that had cost ninepence in 1800, by 1810 carried a price of a shilling and fivepence. The effective increase, to a handloom weaver who had seen his income halved in the same decade, was even more onerous, from 4 percent of his weekly wage to more than 14 percent.

  Resentment and hunger among Britain’s weavers made for an explosive mixture. The first shots of the “rebellion,” however, were fired, not by weavers of broadloom but by an even more militant subset of textile artisans: Nottingham’s stocking knitters.

  The technique of knotting and looping a single length of yarn into a continuous fabric is a fairly new technique, at least as compared to weaving, but versions still date back several thousand years. Evidence of the earliest, the single-needle craft known retrospectively by the Norse term nalbinding, has been found in the third-century CE Syrian city of Dura-Europos, but the use of double needles to pull one knot through another didn’t replace the far more difficult technique until the early Middle Ages. Double-needle knitting is not only faster, but it can, by selective choice of dropped stitches, curve in three dimensions, and it is therefore a highly attractive method for producing garments that need to be form-fitting. For most of human history, this meant extremities: gloves for hands, and (especially) stockings for feet. The skill required to produce a knitted sock by hand was great enough, and the investment in training so expensive, that stockingers were even more opposed to mechanization than either spinners or weavers.

  This did not, of course, eliminate the urge to invent. The stocking frame, the world’s first knitting machine, was designed and built in 1589 by William Lee of Nottingham, a onetime curate who twice attempted to secure patent protection, failing both times. The lack of a patent66 took royalties out of Lee’s pocket but did nothing to stall the widespread adoption of the machine, which increased speed from a hundred stitches per minute to a thousand. This demanded a response from the stocking makers; in 1657, during the Protectorate, the London Company of Framework Knitters persuaded Oliver Cromwell to grant them a charter, and thus effective control over the production of knitted fabric throughout England. Sixty years later, disputes between the guilds of London and Nottingham ended with the latter independent of its parent guild and home to lots of new stockingers.* In the late 1770s, they petitioned Parliament67 to formalize their exclusive ownership of their craft with a law entitled “the Art and Mystery of Framework Knitting,” and when it failed to pass, they rioted in Nottingham.

  The stockingers’ fierce defense of their prerogatives thus had a long list of precedents on March 11, 1811, when the first shots of the Luddite “rebellion” were fired. By then, Nottingham alone probably had nine thousand stocking frames, Leicestershire and Derbyshire another eleven thousand—and fewer than half were in use. Their owner-operators had become victims of both competition from factory “cut-ups” (stockings sewn together from two or more knit pieces, which had the benefit of being easier and cheaper to make, though far less sturdy) and the vagaries of Regency fashion; the legendary dandy Beau Brummel, who famously claimed that a frugal man could, with discipline, dress himself for no more than £1,000 a year, preferred trousers to knee socks.

  The stockingers began in the town of Arnold,68 where weaving frames were being used to make cut-ups and, even worse, were being operated by weavers who had not yet completed the seven-year apprenticeship that the law required. They moved next to Nottingham and the weaver-heavy villages surrounding it, attacking virtually every night for weeks, a few dozen men carrying torches and using prybars and hammers to turn wooden frames—and any doors, walls, or windows that surrounded them—into kindling. None of the perpetrators were arrested, much less convicted and punished.

  The attacks continued throughout the spring69 of 1811, and after a brief summertime lull started up again in the fall, by which time nearly one thousand weaving frames had been destroyed (out of the 25,000 to 29,000 then in Nottingham, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire), resulting in damages of between £6,000 and £10,000. That November, a commander70 using the nom de sabotage of Ned Ludd (sometimes Lud)—the name was supposedly derived from an apprentice to a Leicester stockinger named Ned Ludham whose reaction to a reprimand was to hammer the nearest stocking frame to splinters—led a series of increasingly daring attacks throughout the Midlands. On November 13, a letter to the Home Office demanded action against the “2000 men, many of them armed,71 [who] were riotously traversing the County of Nottingham.”

  By December 1811, rioters appeared in the cotton manufacturing capital of Manchester, where Luddites smashed both weaving and spinning machinery. Because Manchester was further down the path72 to industrialization, and therefore housed such machines in large factories as opposed to small shops, the destruction demanded larger, and better organized, mobs. Because the communities they targeted were likewise better protected—Manchester alone had more than three thousand men73 serving as constables or members of the city’s night watch—it also put more of them at risk of capture, and by 1812, dozens of Luddites were on trial. Most were acquitted, but all were required to take loyalty oaths, and those at risk of punishment were granted royal pardons, though only under condition that they renounce Luddism and reaffirm their loyalty to the Crown on pain of death.

  By 1812, however, the riots had started to inspire other disaffected laborers. In January, the W
est Riding of Yorkshire74 was subject to regular attacks by groups of “croppers” (men who used fifty-pound hand shears to cut the nap from woolen cloth, thus making it smooth) in fear for their jobs by the introduction of yet other new inventions: the once-banned gig mill, which raised the nap of the wool so that it could be sheared; and the complete shearing frame, which made a slightly inferior article, but could be operated by relatively unskilled workers.

  On January 1, the Framework Knitters issued a document that declared, among other things,

  Whereas by the charter75 granted by our late sovereign Lord Charles II by the Grace of God King of Great Britain France and Ireland, the framework knitters are empowered to break and destroy all frames and engines that fabricate articles in a fraudulent and deceitful manner and to destroy all framework knitters’ goods whatsoever that are so made and whereas a number of deceitful unprincipled and intriguing persons did attain an Act to be passed in the 28th year of our present sovereign Lord George III whereby it was enacted that persons entering by force into any house shop or place to break or destroy frames should be adjudged guilty of felony and as we are fully convinced that such Act was obtained in the most fraudulent interested and electioneering manner and that the honourable the Parliament of Great Britain was deceived as to the motives and intentions of the persons who obtained such Act we therefore the framework knitters do hereby declare the aforesaid Act to be null and void….

  Given under my hand this first day of January 1812. God protect the Trade. Ned Lud’s Office—Sherwood Forest

  The choice of words is revealing. The knitters believed themselves to be not merely injured economically, but victims of fraud and deceit. This made them not only self-interested76 but self-righteous, and through the spring of 1812, attacks grew more and more violent, with total damage estimated at £100,000 and at least a dozen deaths, almost all of them Luddites shot by horsemen from the Scots Greys, an army troop quartered nearby. In self-defense, the Luddites began targeting armories in order to equip themselves with firearms and ammunition; more alarming to the national government, the mobs had adopted Jacobin vernacular and costume, including the red flag, the drapeau rouge, of the Revolution. The national government was ready to react, or, more precisely, overreact. In February 1812, frame breaking was made a capital offense, and twelve thousand soldiers—roughly the number of British troops the future Duke of Wellington had led into battle against the French in Portugal four years earlier—deployed to enforce it. During a single Luddite attack on a Lancashire steam loom on April 18, five were killed and eighteen wounded. Hundreds were transported to Australia, and even more imprisoned. On April 28, a group of Luddites led by the onetime cropper George Mellor attacked the Rawfolds Mill and killed William Horsfall, its owner. Newspapers were reporting not just a local insurrection but a national rebellion.

  Much of it was exaggeration. In July 1812, another letter to the Home Office, this from Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding, described a somewhat less frantic scene:

  I do not mean to say, that parties of Luddites77 have not been met travelling from place to place, and perhaps marshalled in some degree of order, but that there is no evidence whatever, that any one person has yet established the fact of their having been assembled and drilling in a military way—as far as negative evidence can go, I think, the contrary seems established.

  The Luddite legend has survived for centuries in part because of the appeal of a romantic brotherhood, a secret society complete with blood oaths: “I,______, of my own free will and accord do hereby promise, and swear that I will never reveal any of the names of any one of this secret committee, under the penalty of being sent out of this world by the first brother that may meet me, I furthermore do swear, that I will pursue with unceasing vengeance any traitor or traitors …” and even secret signals and passwords:

  You must raise your right hand78 over your right eye if there be another Luddite in company he will raise his left hand over his left eye—then you must raise the forefinger of your right hand to the right side of your mouth—the other will raise the little finger of his left hand to the left side of his mouth and will say What are you? The answer, Determined—he will say, What for? Your answer, Free Liberty—then he will converse with you and tell you anything he knows….

  Though they would not have used the terms, the Luddites were on one side of a newly violent debate about the relationship between labor and property. Opposing them was the newfangled notion that ideas were property; the Luddites argued (with crowbars and torches) that their skills were property. The right of men to enjoy the fruits of their labor gave them license to defend the free exercise of those skills in exactly the same way that they might defend their houses.

  The Luddite rebellion failed for the most obvious reason: an enormous disparity in military power, power that the national government was, eventually, willing to bring to bear. The Luddite idea lost the historical battle—“Luddite” is not, in most of the contemporary world, used as anything but an insult—because its thesis, which might be abbreviated as “property equals labor plus skill,” was less attractive than the idea that property equals labor plus ideas. The victory of the latter was decided not by argument, but economics: it produced more wealth, not just for individuals, but for an entire nation. Over time, the patents of Lombe, Kay, Hargreaves, and Arkwright not only became public property but attracted competing and superior inventions. In 1813, there were 2,400 power looms79 in England; in 1820 there were 12,150, and by 1833 more than 85,000. With the introduction of the iron power loom by Henry Maudslay’s onetime assistant Richard Roberts in 1822, a weaver could produce seven pieces of cotton shirting in a week, each twenty-four yards long, while a hand weaver could make only two. Three years later, the same weaver would average twelve weekly, and six years after that, “a steam-loom weaver,80 from 15 to 20 years of age, assisted by a girl about 12 years of age, attending to four looms, [could] weave eighteen similar pieces in a week; some can weave twenty.” During the century and a half81 that followed the Calico Acts, the productivity of the cotton industry increased fourteenfold.

  We feel real poignancy when we recall the bucolic life (even if we do so through the soft focus of nostalgia) of a country weaver happy in his work skills and content with his life. But those skills, like those of a medieval goldsmith or an ancient carpenter, could not, by their very nature, reproduce themselves outside the closed community of the initiates. One lesson of the Luddite rebellion specifically, and the Industrial Revolution generally, is that maintaining the prosperity of those closed communities—their pride in workmanship as well as their economic well-being—can only be paid for by those outside the communities: by society at large. A great artisan can make a family prosperous; a great inventor can enrich an entire nation.

  * The name, which appears in even some modern maps, is not such a leap as it seems. The city was also known, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Legorno, harking back to a pre-Roman people known as the Ligurians, either directly or because of proximity to the Ligurian Sea. The two names, despite the number of shared letters, have no etymological connection.

  * In one sense, the plans were unnecessary, since the mill was described in Zonca’s posthumously published 1607 book Novo teatro di machine, a copy of which was owned by the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Unfortunately, while there is no reason to think that Lombe, or for that matter anyone else, was aware of it, the existence of the book makes at least some of the more romantic stories about the theft slightly less persuasive. As a case in point, Lombe’s first biographer, William Hutton, wrote that the Piedmontese silk weavers were so angry at the theft of their secrets that they sent a femme fatale (“an artful woman,” in Hutton’s words) to England to seduce and poison John Lombe.

  * The Mercer’s Company, which dates back to at least 1348 and which was chosen by the Lord Mayor of London as the first guild in the city’s hierarchy in 1515, still exists, along with one hundred other so-called “liv
ery” companies including traditional ones like goldsmiths and weavers and rather more modern ones like information technologists.

  * Or possibly not. See Thomas Highs’s version, below.

  * One of them was the future prime minister Robert Peel, whose father had been a partner of Hargreaves.

  * This nickname for Nightingale, great-uncle of Florence, was apparently earned by his daredevil horseback riding.

  * It’s not fully comprehensible even today, since it depends on a principle that remains problematic: the belief that a direct line can be drawn from a single invention to a single inventor. In the 1920s, the historians William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas first documented the notion of “multiples”—simultaneous discovery by different people, which occurred with the telephone (Bell and Elisha Gray), thermometer (six different inventors), steamboat (Fulton, Jouffroy, Stevens, etc.), and calculus (Newton and Leibniz). Robert K. Merton wrote an essay on scientific discovery in the 1960s suggesting that the more gifted the scientist, the more likely that his discoveries will be multiply discovered, thus inspiring the statistician Stephen Stigler to formulate Stigler’s Law: No scientific discovery is ever named48 after its original discoverer.

  * He was also, apparently, convinced of the practicality of such a machine by the success of the “Mechanical Turk,” a supposed chess-playing robot that had mystified all of Europe and which had not yet been revealed as one of the era’s great hoaxes: a hollow figurine concealing a human operator. Inventors are sometimes beneficiaries of their own ignorance.