That left stealing the technology. On November 11, 1789, only a few weeks after Washington visited the Hartford Woolen Manufactory, a packet from England arrived in New York with a twenty-one-year-old passenger from Britain named Samuel Slater. Slater had just completed his apprenticeship at a textile mill in Belper, Derbyshire. Ambitious and intelligent, Slater had come to realize that the chances of his ever acquiring a mill of his own in England were highly remote. Such was not the case on the other side of the Atlantic, assuming, of course, he could reproduce British technology in America.
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