In 1777, two workmen, Frost and Holmes, were both
engaged in making point-net by means of the modifications they had
introduced in the stocking-frame; and in the course of about thirty
years, so rapid was the growth of this branch of production that
1500 point-net frames were at work, giving employment to upwards of
15,000 people. Owing, however, to the war, to change of fashion,
and to other circumstances, the Nottingham lace manufacture rapidly
fell off; and it continued in a decaying state until the invention
of the Bobbin-net Machine by John Heathcoat, late M.P. for
Tiverton, which had the effect of at once re-establishing the
manufacture on solid foundations.
John Heathcoat was the youngest son of a respectable small farmer
at Duffield, Derbyshire, where he was born in 1783. When at school
he made steady and rapid progress, but was early removed from it to
be apprenticed to a frame-smith near Loughborough. The boy soon
learnt to handle tools with dexterity, and he acquired a minute
knowledge of the parts of which the stocking-frame was composed, as
well as of the more intricate warp-machine. At his leisure he
studied how to introduce improvements in them, and his friend, Mr.
Bazley, M.P., states that as early as the age of sixteen, he
conceived the idea of inventing a machine by which lace might be
made similar to Buckingham or French lace, then all made by hand.
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