Leavers Lace Machine

The Leavers lace machine is a textile machine that produces intricate patterned lace resembling handmade bobbin lace, using a Jacquard-style punched card mechanism to control which threads twist together to form the pattern. English mechanic John Leavers developed the machine around 1813, adapting earlier bobbinet lace-making machinery and combining it with Jacquard's punched card control system to allow far more complex patterns than plain net machines could produce. The Leavers machine became the dominant technology for fine machine-made lace through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Nottingham, England, and Calais, France, both of which grew into major lace manufacturing centers built around the machine.