The textile industry in Brno here in Czech Republic (sometimes called "Moravian Manchester") was hugely helped by a local noble posing as a worker in England &

The textile industry in Brno here in Czech Republic (sometimes called "Moravian Manchester") was hugely helped by a local noble posing as a worker in England & the smuggling detailed self-drawn plans of industrial machinery back: "Brno’s fortunes were changed forever when a young freemason called Franz Hugo Salma set out for England in 1801. He intended to steal the plans for the most modern textile machinery in the world. His crime, the first recorded act of industrial espionage, boosted the competitiveness of Moravian textiles. Soon after smuggling the plans out disguised as a worker, and handing them over to Brno’s fledgling textile industry, Brno became the most important textile centre in the Habsburg empire." You can even go see some of the original plans in a museum: "Eleven designs are still preserved in the library of the Rájec chateau. They form a unique set of documents demonstrating both the level of wool processing technology at the turn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as the aims and means of the relatively rare business of industrial espionage at that time." https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/brno-phenomenon/this-is-brno-katerina-tuckova-in-search-of-brnos-industrial-history/ https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/brno-phenomenon/this-is-brno-kate... https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/place/salm-reifferscheidt-palace/ https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/place/salm-reifferscheidt-palace/