The workers named their movement after a man who probably never existed.
According to a story first recorded in 1847, a young apprentice named Ned Ludd smashed two stocking frames in a fit of rage in Leicestershire in 1779 after being told to correct how he was operating them.1 No evidence confirms that Ludd ever existed. Different versions of the legend place him in Anstey, near Leicester, or in Sherwood Forest, the same mythical home as Robin Hood.
On March 11, 1811, in Arnold, Nottinghamshire, hundreds of textile workers rallied to demand better wages. When employers refused, the crowd broke into a factory that night and destroyed stocking frames.2 The protesters adopted the apocryphal name, calling themselves followers of "General Ludd" and dispatching threatening letters signed "Ned Lud's Office, Sherwood Forest."
The Luddites were not opposed to technology itself. Many were highly skilled machine operators.3 Their targets were specific: in Nottinghamshire, the wide knitting frames used to produce cheap, inferior goods; in Lancashire, steam-powered looms threatening cotton workers' wages; in Yorkshire, shearing frames that finished woollen cloth. They attacked the machines that manufacturers used to circumvent established labor practices and replace skilled artisans with lower-paid workers.
Parliament made machine-breaking a capital offense. At a mass trial in York in 1813, multiple Luddites were hanged or transported to penal colonies.4 At one point, more British soldiers were deployed against the Luddites than were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula.5
The movement subsided by 1816. The word survived. By 1961, "luddite" was being applied in print to anyone who rejected automation or new technology.6 The original Luddites objected to how machines were being used to eliminate their livelihoods. The modern usage dropped the economics and kept only the resistance.