[908B64B197]

> but he had studied the machinery and memorized plans for it

Did he? There's no evidence for that.

To me, it sounds like a smart Harvard grad just figured out a few missing pieces required to get textile manufacturing going. Wasn't his first time doing industrial processes at scale either: he successfully ran a distillery before that.

It's also interesting to remember that it happened at a time England was in open war against the United States. It's not really the same right now with Chinese companies trying to get into the US market and vice versa. Both countries claim to be allied but there's a clear disregard for the laws of one particular country!

Maybe a better analogy to what Francis Lowell did would be operation paperclip. The US did steal technology from Germany at the end of the war [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

[GhettoComputers]

Germany was stripped by vultures, the AK-47 is also said to have come from Germany design, methadone is a nazi drug, our warming methods for people submerged in cold is from human experiments on tortured and frozen prisoners.