The Sock Monkey: A Great Depression Invention From a Swedish Immigrant's Machine
Near Rockford, Illinois
In eighteen sixty-eight, a Swedish immigrant named John Nelson patented a sock-knitting machine. He had been in Rockford for a few years by then, part of the same Swedish wave that built the furniture cooperatives. His machine could knit seamless work socks automatically, and the socks it produced became so popular across the country that the word Rockford became a generic term for that style of seamless hosiery. Stores sold Rockfords the way they sold Levi's.
On September fifteenth, eighteen eighty, the Nelson Knitting Company formally incorporated. For fifty years it produced what it called Celebrated Rockford Seamless Hosiery and sold them under the name of the Nelson Sock. The market for seamless work socks was enormous and consistent, built on the bodies of working men across the industrial Midwest.
In nineteen thirty-two, in the depths of the Depression, an advertising executive named Howard Monk had an idea. He proposed changing the heel of the brown work sock from white to red. The red heel was marketed with the slogan de-tec-tip, a reference to its visibility during wear. The distinctive red heel changed what families did with worn-out socks.
Nobody knows exactly who first stuffed a pair of Rockford Red Heel socks with cotton and sewed them into the shape of a monkey. The specific folk-craft invention appears to have emerged in the nineteen thirties and forties, when Depression-era families made toys from worn materials. In nineteen fifty-three, a woman named Helen Cooke received a patent for a sock monkey design. She later sold the patent to the Nelson Knitting Company for seven hundred fifty dollars.
The sock monkey became a global phenomenon. The red-heeled sock from a Swedish immigrant's Rockford knitting machine is still manufactured, still sold, and still gets folded into small stuffed animals in households all over the world.
