How to Knit a Yacht

The textile industry has long depended on large machines for knitting such small items as stockings and sweaters, but the current boom in skin-tight stretch clothes has hatched far more ambitious devices.

In Britain, Macqueen Cybernetics Ltd. has developed a monster that can do practically everything for a knitted garment except pour the customer into it. It scans a design electronically, then out of its computer brain come punched tapes that control the pattern of the material and tell each needle when to knit or purl.

Once set to work, the machine eats up yarn and knits in a frenzy. It works in eight colors and three dimensions, making the garment an exact fit for the figure for which it was designed. An elaborately tailored dress, ready for buttons and hemming, takes about 52 minutes. The tapes can be changed quickly to make a different size or pattern.

Kenneth G. Macqueen, who developed the demon knitter, began his career as a medical student but "whammed out be cause I wasn't much good." Then he manufactured rubber facial replacements for disfigured war victims. "To make sure they would stick," he says, "I sandpapered my tum and fixed an ear onto it with cement and wore it four months."

After stints with airplane instruments, cosmetic packaging, department stores and advertising, he bore down on an alliance between electronics and knitting.

Bigger things now beckon. "Boats! Yachts!" says Macqueen enthusiastically. "There's no difference, really, between knitting a boat and knitting a bra cup. The boat is about the same shape, just bigger that's all." He is hard at work on a machine to knit glass-fiber yarn into streamlined boat hulls up to 40 ft. long. "You put the garment into a mold," says Macqueen, "and plasticize it. Hey, presto! You have a yacht!"

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