“A machine that does the work of many? Ban it.”

The inventor who was “strangled or drowned”

The story comes from an Italian abbot, Lancellotti, writing in 1579 (published in Venice in 1636). He reported that Anthony Müller had seen, about 50 years earlier in Danzig, a machine that wove four to six pieces at once. The mayor, he wrote, feared it would throw workmen onto the streets and had the inventor “secretly strangled or drowned” (Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1867), ch. 15 §5 (PDF)). Karl Marx quoted it in Capital in 1867, which is largely why it is still repeated (Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1867), ch. 15 §5 (PDF)).

It is one second-hand sentence, about events half a century earlier, with no named inventor. We treat it as a legend. A multi-shuttle ribbon loom does appear to have been at work in Danzig towards the end of the 16th century (Wikipedia, “Ribbon” (from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica)).

Real laws against a real machine

The bans are better documented. In Leiden, ribbon-weavers’ riots led the town to prohibit the loom, and the Dutch States General issued restrictive decrees in 1632 and 1639 before allowing it under conditions in 1661. It was banned in Cologne in 1676, and an imperial edict of 1685 forbade it throughout Germany. In Hamburg it was publicly burned. Saxony allowed it openly only from 1765 (Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1867), ch. 15 §5 (PDF)). When it reached London in 1676 it caused disturbances but doesn’t appear to have been banned (Wikipedia, “Ribbon” (from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica)).

The bans delayed the machine but didn’t stop it. The ribbon loom became a forerunner of the power loom (Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1867), ch. 15 §5 (PDF)).

Elizabeth I and William Lee’s stocking frame

William Lee invented the stocking frame, a knitting machine, in 1589. The popular story says Elizabeth I refused him a patent because it would ruin her hand-knitting subjects, telling him, “Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects” (Wikipedia, “William Lee (inventor)”).

That speech doesn’t appear in the record until the 19th century, in a history of the framework knitters, and modern historians dismiss it (Wikipedia, “William Lee (inventor)”) (Wikipedia, “Stocking frame”). What is solid is that the frame spread anyway. Two centuries later the Nottinghamshire stockingers who worked it became the first Luddites (Smithsonian Magazine, 2011 (Richard Conniff)) (see the Luddites).

What the popular version gets wrong

Sources

• Smithsonian Magazine, 2011 (Richard Conniff)
• Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1867), ch. 15 §5 (PDF)
• Wikipedia, “Ribbon” (from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica)
• Wikipedia, “William Lee (inventor)”
• Wikipedia, “Stocking frame”

Last reviewed: 22 Oct 2026. Historical figures are quoted as the sources publish them; where sources disagree, we say so.