Nottingham lace curtain machine
lace-making machine invented in 1846
The lace curtain machine is a lace machine invented by John Livesey in Nottingham in 1846. It was an adaptation of John Heathcoat's bobbinet machine. It made the miles of curtaining which screened Victorian and later windows. Popular among a range of social groups, different sizes and styles were marketed to various consumers.
History
The forerunner of the mechanical lace-making machine was the 1589 stocking frame. This is a weaving frame fitted with a bar of bearded needles that passed back and forth, to and from the operator. There was no warp. The beards were simultaneously depressed by a presser bar catching the weft and holding it back for a course, making a row of loops. After Jeremiah Strutt had modified the machine in 1759 to make it capable of ribbing, in 1764 Hammond introduced a tickler stick to transfer the loops 2 or 3 gaits sideways. In this way, mechanical lace-making was born.
“Nottingham lace curtain machine” enters the record as lace-making machine invented in 1846. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nottingham, lace and curtain can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28454467. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1846, 1589, 1759 and 1764.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nottingham lace curtain machine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.