Pirated Technology Was Patented
Under the Patent Act of 1793, the United States granted dubious patents to Americans who had pirated technology from other countries at the same time that it barred foreign inventors from receiving patents. “America thus became, by national policy and legislative act, the world’s premier legal sanctuary for industrial pirates,” writes Pat Choate in his book Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization. “Any American could bring a foreign innovation to the United States and commercialize the idea, all with total legal immunity.”
That’s what Samuel Slater did. The English-born cotton mill supervisor posed as a farmhand and sailed for the United States in 1789. Having memorized the details of Richard Arkwright’s patented spinning frames that he oversaw, Slater established the young country’s first water-powered textile mill in Rhode Island and became a rich man. While President Andrew Jackson dubbed him “Father of American Manufactures,” the English had a quite different nickname for him—“Slater the Traitor.”
More than two decades after Slater’s emigration, the textile industry in the United States still lagged behind the British who had the cutting-edge technology of the Cartwright power loom, the water-driven machine that weaved thread into finished cloth. Living in Edinburgh, Scotland, under doctor’s orders to recuperate from nervous exhaustion, Lowell grew determined to bring British technology back to the United States.
Lowell’s upper-crust pedigree had made him an unlikely spy, but that was precisely how he gained access. Bearing letters of reference, the sickly American did not appear to be a threat to the textile mill owners and England and Scotland who gave him the unusual privilege of touring their factories, which were concealed behind fortress-like walls topped with spikes and broken glass. Lowell took no notes and asked few questions, but all the while he studied the power loom design and committed it to memory.
Back in Boston, Lowell did more than replicate the pirated British technology. With the help of Paul Moody, he improved upon Cartwright’s power loom in 1814 by constructing in Waltham, Massachusetts, the first integrated textile manufacturing mill, which converted cotton into finished cloth under one roof.
The spinning water wheels of American textile mills—and the stolen secrets upon which they were built—propelled the United States forward and quickly transformed it into one of the world’s leading industrial powers.