Industrial espionage in 1789, lawyers, and progress
From "This Week's Clue: Secret of Slater's Mill":
The tour tells the story of Samuel Slater . He was born in England, and apprenticed in a textile mill. Seeing his home market as saturated he emigrated to the U.S. in 1789. He did this secretly. As a brief Web biography of him notes, "it was illegal at the time to export anything to the U.S. relating to machinery, including engineers. Also, the U.S. was offering rewards for textile information."
And the real reason I quoted it:
Lawyers cannot stop progress. They can only force it to go elsewhere. And there will always be an elsewhere. Until the present rule of the lawyer is replaced again by the rule of the engineer, America is going backward. Samuel Slater today may be Chinese, but he will in the end rule the day.