During Britain’s industrial revolution in the early 1800s, people across the country suddenly found themselves out of work because machines could do the same job faster and cheaper. With their livelihoods on the chopping block, a group of artisan textile workers, who called themselves the Luddites, decided to fight back against the rise of the machines by destroying them; they smashed them with hammers and burned factories to the ground. At the helm of this movement was a man named Ned Ludd. And although he was the leader of the movement, he didn’t exist.

While the Luddites were causing mayhem at local factories by destroying the machines that were taking their jobs, authorities were trying to cut them off anyway they could. The best way to do that would have been to take down the group’s leader, Ned Ludd, who also went by General Ludd, Captain Ludd and King Ludd. Ludd was supposedly a scary, ghostly looking man who constantly carried a weapon at his side and had the power to call the forces of the Luddites to his aid. Needless to say, he was public enemy number one.

However, as the police searched day and night, Ludd was never found because he never really existed at all. Instead, the name was borrowed from a man named Luddlam who lived in the city of Leicester 22 years before the Luddite movement took root. The story goes, according to Smithsonian Magazine, that Luddlam was a low-level textile worker who had a hissy fit one day when his boss critiqued his knitting. After his superior told him to “square his needles,” Luddlam smashed the crap out of a machine in a fit of rage. After learning about the incident, the Luddites decided to make up Ludd as the fictional leader of their group.

Nowadays, the name Luddite is usually reserved as an insult for people who either are ignorant of modern technology or as a badge of honor for people who have rejected it. Either way, it really has little to do with what the 19th-century movement was all about: labor. Back then, the Luddites were fighting for their jobs, not against machines because they were scary. In fact, many Luddites were extremely talented with the machinery they were fighting and used their knowledge of them to destroy them.

So, the next time you hear the term “Luddite” thrown around all willy-nilly, remember what the movement was actually about and that it’s leader was more legend than man.