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The sock monkey's most direct predecessors originated in the Victorian era, when the craze for imitation stuffed animals swept from Europe into North America and met the burgeoning Arts and Crafts Movement. Craft makers began sewing stuffed animals as toys to comfort children, and, as tales of the Scramble for Africa increased the public's familiarity with exotic species, monkey toys soon became a fixture of American nurseries. Tales like Rudyard Kipling's the Jungle Book and Just So Stories inspired crafters to create toys that depicted exotic animals, however these early stuffed monkeys were not necessarily made from socks, and also lacked the characteristic red lips of the sock monkeys popular today. John Nelson, a Swedish immigrant to the United States, patented the sock-knitting machine in 1868, and began knitting socks on an automatic machine in Rockford, Illinois as early as 1870. On September 15, 1880, the Nelson Knitting Company formed, producing "Celebrated Rockford Seamless Hosiery," and selling them under the name of the "Nelson Sock." John Nelson's son Franklin created a machine that knitted a sock without seams in the heel. The original machine required workers to sew every seam at the heel. The seamless sock saved time and labour costs and it became so popular, companies began to imitate his idea. These seamless work socks were so popular that the market was soon flooded with imitators, and socks of this type were known under the generic term "Rockfords". The iconic sock monkeys made from red-heeled socks, known today as the Rockford Red Heel, emerged at the earliest in 1932, the year the Nelson Knitting Company added the trademark red heel to its product. In 1932, advertising executive Howard Monk came up with an idea to change the heel of the brown sock from white to red. The red heeled sock was marketed as "de-tec-tip." Nelson Knitting added the red heel "De-Tec-Tip" to assure its customers that they were buying "original Rockfords" as opposed to the generic "Rockfords". This red heel gave the monkeys their distinctive mouth and during the Great Depression, American crafters first made sock monkeys out of worn-out Rockford Red Heel Socks.