In the last decades of the 18th century, a garrulous North American was a conspicuous presence in the working class colonies of Manchester, England. He also frequented working class localities in other parts of England, and in Ireland. This was Thomas Atwood Digges, the scion of a wealthy family in Maryland, usa, and a thwarted novelist. But Digges was not in England in search of any literary pursuit. He was a spy on the look out for designs of new machines that inventors in early industrial England were producing. Much of early American industrialisation owed itself to the efforts of industrial spies such as Digges. According to historian Doron Ben Atar, "Copyright violations and outright economic espionage were key elements in the political and economic life of newly-independent us.'

The founding fathers of the country realised that economic self-sufficiency was essential to ensure the political independence of the young republic. Besides, while in the 17th and even the early-18th centuries, Britain shared technological innovations selectively with its American colonies, it became less willing to do so once the colonies asserted their independence. Exporting industrial equipment from Britain's textile, leather, metal, glass and clock- making industries was prohibited in the 1780s. The New World responded with technology piracy. James Watt's steam engine was among the first to be copied. According to Ben Atar, the steamboats of John Fitch and James Rumsey used the technique employed by Watt's more famous steam engine. In 1787, Rumsey obtained a patent from the state of Virginia for steam navigation. Many followed in Fitch's and Rumsey's footsteps. Among them was Samuel Compton, whose spinning frame