PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Samuel Slater: Part 1
Samuel Slater started the American industrial revolution in 1789, when he organised a cotton mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and in it initiated a factory management system that would be replicated throughout the country, and would help propel America very quickly into being the most prosperous nation ever in the history of the world.
What a pity then, that if he did exactly the same thing today, he would be guilty of trade secret misappropriation and, almost certainly, prosecuted as a criminal under the US Economic Espionage Act of 1996.
Samuel Slater was born at the family farm at Belper, Derbyshire, England on 9 June 1768 to William and Elizabeth Slater just one year before Sir Richard Arkwright would patent his automatic spinning machine and James Watt would patent his steam engine.
Samuel’s father died when Samuel was only 14-years old and he so he took the unusual step of signing his own indenture papers for an apprenticeship with the local cotton mill in Belper owned by Jedediah Strutt. Strutt had started the business in 1776 after he dissolved his partnership with Arkwright in a mill at Cromford.
At the end of his seven-year apprenticeship and, like most other apprentices of the day, he planned when he came out of his time to be a business owner in his own right, and logically thought of going into partnership with Stutt. However, Strutt told him that his three sons, George, William and Joseph would be taking over the business.
Slater considered starting a business in England, but technology was advancing so quickly (sound familiar?) that he knew that he would never have sufficient capital to start a business venture there.
Quite by chance, in 1787 Slater read a copy of the Philadelphia newspaper where he saw that a £100 bounty (a lot of money then) had just been paid to the designer of a cloth making machine in New York. Slater was not slow to realise that the mill where he worked was full of such machines and, importantly, that he knew exactly how they worked.
He therefore decided to steal the Arkwright technology, take it to America and claim the money.
Despite the fact that there were strict laws in place in England at the time prohibiting the export of textile machinery to any other country (enacted 1774), and another law banning the emigration of skilled men abroad, he left Derbyshire bound for America.
He journeyed first to London where he spent a few days sightseeing. He had known from the first day he had hatched his scheme that if he was to fool the English authorities and get away with his crimes, he must tell no one of his plans. Thus, only when he was in London was it that he let his family know he was leaving for America - by posting them a letter.
The English Excise and Customs always questioned passengers at their departure ports to detect would-be criminals. To outwit them, Slater deceptively assumed the character of a farm labourer and he sewed his apprentice indenture papers inside the lining of his jacket, so the authorities found nothing when they searched him when he set sail for America on 1 September 1789.
The objective of Slater’s plan was to make money by stealing the Arkwright cotton-spinning technology and he did this, spectacularly, by memorising all the details of the spinning machines, so that he could reconstruct copies of them as soon as he reached America.
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