For fifteen years after moving to Nottingham Mundella devoted his energy to reinventing the mechanics of a hosiery industry which for the most part relied on mechanical stocking frames invented in 1589 being operated by perennially-poor framework-knitters in their own homes. He pioneered many changes, including new machines which produced tubular knitting rather than the stocking-frame's straight knit. Mundella had long maintained that the best machines in the hosiery trade were "principally the inventions of working men". Not by his own brain, but by encouraging inventors within the company (many of them loom operators) and sharing patents with them, Mundella was able to develop much new hosiery-making machinery, a lot of it steam-driven, including a technological revolution: a machine which for the first time enabled a stocking to be made and fully-fashioned by automatic action without stopping the machine. Stockings could now be made a hundred times faster than they could by the framework knitters. Mundella was to take this change on to a personal fortune.