Piracy and Progress

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. This week we’re looking at the American history of intellectual property, what’s being considered legally protected and what that protection has meant for creators and for consumers.

PETER: In the years just after American independence, intellectual property rights stood to make or break the American economy. On one side of the equation, protected British technology. On the other, Americans itching to get their hands on those inventions.

ED: Here’s the situation. It’s the 1780s and the new American economy is a mess. Britain, on the other hand, is an economic powerhouse. It’s manufacturing technology, especially for textile production, is fueling an industrial boom.

And Britain, understandably, does not want this boom to extend to its former colonies. So it tightens restrictions on the export of machinery. You literally cannot take most British inventions outside of the country.

PETER: Americans have to find ways to beat this system. They come up with three main tactics. Tactic number one, team up with British smugglers.

DORON BEN-ATAR: Let me tell you a story that I particularly like.

BRIAN: This is Doron Ben-Atar, a historian at Fordham University. His story is about a merchant named Benjamin Phillips.

DORON BEN-ATAR: So Phillips is an Englishman who wants to make a killing. He looks at Americans. He says, oh, well, I have a way to start a cotton factory in the United States.

PETER: Mmhmm.

DORON BEN-ATAR: And so he gets a machine, a cotton machine. And three spinning machines. He puts them in carts. It’s marked as Wedgewood China. Because there are restrictions. You’re not allowed to do that. And he sends them to Philadelphia.

PETER: Seems like a great plan. But there’s a hitch.

DORON BEN-ATAR: The problem was that Phillips dies. And the machines arrive in Philadelphia. And nobody knows how to put them together.

PETER: There aren’t specifications written in some East Asian country in several languages?

[LAUGHTER]

DORON BEN-ATAR: Nothing. Nothing. It’s like me and Ikea. Even with specifications– I can get specifications at Ikea. I still cannot make the stupid bookshelf.

ED: Not being able to make the stupid bookshelf was exactly the problem for would-be American manufacturers. Even when they could get their hands on the actual technology, they still needed people who knew how to work it.

PETER: So Americans tried tactic number two. Get British know-how to their shores, convince skilled workers to emigrate. American businesses offered cushy deals to British workers like cash awards for migrating and financial support for their family members who stayed behind in England. Plenty of English artisans wanted to make the trip.

ED: But here, too, there was a hurdle. The crown wanted those workers to stay in Britain, where their skills could fuel the British economy. So Britain simply forbade many of them from leaving.

DORON BEN-ATAR: There was a 200-pound fine and forfeiture of equipment and a 12-month imprisonment punishment for artisans leaving. And for people in the textile industry it was worse. It was 500-pound fine and forfeiture of equipment.

PETER: But these laws didn’t work quite as well as the British. People slipped through the cracks. Remember, this was the 1780s and border control wasn’t quite what it is today.

ED: At the same time, Americans were making the reverse trip. This was tactic number three– visit Britain and personally track down the technology you need. This could mean sneaking a small machine home in your luggage, or it could mean going straight to the source– getting inside British factories, taking notes on the processes, and smuggling that information home.

PETER: Britain, of course, generally didn’t let foreigners take field trips through its factories.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: But in the early 19th century, an America named Frances Lowell managed to sweet talk his way through a handful of industrial towns.

DORON BEN-ATAR: He was this kind of sickly rich guy. A young rich guy from Boston. And he was sent to England for health reasons. Which is, I still today have no idea. Why would anybody go to England for health? The weather in that country is– it’s Seattle all year round.

PETER: You’re from the Mediterranean. You don’t appreciate this–

DORON BEN-ATAR: You’re correct. So anyway, he sent there. And he looked so frail. And nobody cared. Nobody thought he was a threat.

He was also rich and connected. That helps. So they gave him tour of factories in Scotland and Manchester. And it turns out that Lowell may have been frail and rich, but he turned out to have been very smart and actually with a head– with mathematical inclination.

So at night he– at least the lore is. I have no idea if he did it or not. He wrote notes.

ED: When he came back to the US, Lowell shared those notes with a group of investors. They pooled their money and committed to building an American industrial Mecca that would rival the smokiest cities of England.

He died before the plan was complete. But 1823, his partners incorporated Lowell, Massachusetts. The new town ran on the very technology that Lowell had pirated from England. And over the next few decades, it turned out cheap textiles as fast as its British counterparts.

PETER: Over the next 200 years, the Industrial Revolution born in places like Lowell transformed the United States into an economic powerhouse. Ironically, America is now in the position that Britain used to occupy– the developed country that wants to protect its own intellectual property.

DORON BEN-ATAR: It’s not very different than today. You look at the post-industrial world today. What we have over the developing world is knowledge. All of our wealth is embodied in knowledge. We can’t manufacture anything cheaper than they do.

The only thing we can do is have knowledge. And that’s why the intellectual property regime is such an important element to the sort of well being of the West. And that’s why it’s viewed as such an imperialist, oppressive thing by the developing world.

Because they look at our intellectual property regime and see that we are using these legalistic formalities, these technicalities, to block them from manufacturing the most advanced things. From getting the medicine that they need. From– all of those things are very central to them.

And, of course, they say, well, look. You did the same thing.

[MUSIC]

ED: Doron Ben-Atar is a historian at Fordham University. His book is Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power.