Warp Knitting Machine

A warp knitting machine forms fabric by feeding a separate yarn to roughly every needle across the machine's width, so that each yarn zigzags lengthwise along the fabric rather than looping crosswise from a single thread the way weft knitting does, producing a flat, run-resistant fabric directly off the machine rather than a tube or a single knitted row. The English mechanic Josiah Crane built the first warp knitting frame around 1775 by adapting an existing stocking frame with an added warp beam to feed multiple parallel yarns at once, and Richard March patented a further warp frame in 1778; a sequence of refinements followed, including a point bar in 1786 and cam-based thread control in 1796, before John Heathcoat's 1808 bobbinet machine, an application of the same warp-knitting principle to net and lace, effectively established the modern warp knitting frame's mechanism. Warp knitting machines are distinguished from weft knitting machines such as the circular knitting machine by this thread-per-needle, lengthwise loop structure, which is widely used today for tricot fabric, lace and technical textiles.