From this general description the ground work of a machine may be obtained, which, embracing all the ad vantages, and extending the operations of the tambour ing machine, avoids its most material defects, complexity and expence. The outlines, rather than a full detail, are given, not from any motive of concealment, but of caution, to represent it. merely as what it really is, viz. an untried invention. Wipers of the forms of Figs. 15, 16, and 17, will give all the remaining motions, if fixed on the revolving shaft driven by the operator's hand.
The following table is precisely similar to that em ployed in the tambour work, and will serve as a rule for cutting either wheels or spirals, so as to produce every angle of obliquity which can be required in any pattern, however comprehensive or varied.
.314m/facture of hosiery.
As the tambouring manufacture is produced by suc cessions of lineal chaining in various directions, the more extensive and useful branch of hosiery or stockings, may be regarded merely as the extension of the same to the formation of superficies. In the working of plain hosiery, the loops of the chain are precisely the same as in the tambouring ; and the most simple, although tedious, way of producing this, is by means of four small wires direct ed by the manual operations of women, or what is usually termed kiri:ting. The great time employed in this opera tion, however, has brought it much into disuse, in all those districts where, from the extension of manufac tures, female labour has become valuable and produc tive ; and it is now rarely practised, excepting as the occasional employment of females, whose subsistence does not solely depend on their labour ; and in the north ern counties and isles of Scotland, where female labour, from the want of manufactures, is neither much in demand, nor high in price. The northern islands of Shetland and Orkney are indeed almost the only places where knitting is now practised to any extent ; and the very low prices at which these stockings are sold, suffi ciently prove, that very little indeed is charged for the labour of knitting them. The art of knitting by means of wires is so entirely of that kind which can only be acquired by repeated trials and patient application, that it would be a fruitless waste ruf time to endeavour to teach it by description. The great time necessai y for knitting by wires seems early to have been felt, for the invention of the frame is attributed to a Mr Lee of Cam bridge, so far back as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and upwards of two hundred years ago, at a period when practical mechanics was neither generally understood, nor extensively practised in Britain. Mr Lee, indeed,
it is said, found so very little encouragement, and so many obstacles to the introduction of this machine in his own country, that he emigrated to France, where he found that patronage which he had in vain solicited at home. Thus, whatever honour England may claim a•. having given birth to the inventor of this most impoi taut and useful engine, it is to France that mankind are in debted for its having ever been matured and rendered practically useful.
No description or representation of any of the various stocking-frames in use, is to be found in any mechanical work hitherto published, as far as the writer of this arti cle has been able to learn ; and what little is said of it in former Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, is confined to the meagre and unsatisfactory notice that such an engine exists, without the most distant attempt to describe ei ther the nature of its construction, or the principles of its operation. It has been customary to apologise for this omission, by representing the stocking frame as a ma chine immensely complicated in its parts, and very diffi cult both to represent and to comprehend. The stocking frame unquestionably presents this aspect to a stranger upon a cursory inspection, especially to one who is not previously intimately acquainted with the theory of me chanics, and the practioal application of the laws and principles of motion. Yet in reality many compound en gines exist much more complicated in their operation, which have been the subjects of reiterated discussion and description. The reason of the apparent complexity of the stocking-frame is by no means to be ascribed either to the number or to the complexity of its motions, fur these are neither numerous nor complicated ; but to the great number of its parts, and to the necessity which exists of compressing these into a very small compass, in order to fit them for the operation required. Thu principle by which a single loop is formed embraces the whole ; and it is not the difficulty of forming one, but the necessity of forming many at the same time, that creates the apparent complexity.