Lieven Bauwens
Liévin Bauwens (14 June 1769, in Ghent – 17 March 1822, in Paris) was a Belgian entrepreneur and industrial spy.
At the age of 17, he went to England for three years to learn the latest techniques of tanning.
After taking over his father's tanning business, and having been, in the 1790s, a supplier to the French army of occupation, he undertook, as an industrial spy, several trips to Great Britain and managed to pass through smuggling, in spare parts, a spinning machine, the mule-jenny, as well as personnel qualified to operate it, to the continent.
Using tricks and bribery, and having a safe conduct obtained thanks to his connections with Le Directoire, he bought a Mule Jenny in pieces from Adam Parkinson in Manchester (Salford), which he concealed in crates of sugar or bales of coffee and then shipped them, by a detour via Hamburg (where his brother Jean had a house of commerce), to the continent. This was regarded as espionage, and the death penalty applied.
Having failed to find qualified personnel able to assemble and operate the machines, he also endeavoured, not without difficulty, through his representatives in London, to recruit English workers, using persuasion or by promising high salaries, and attracting them to Hamburg or Scotland. Many were thus led to abandon their families in England without clearly realising that they were guilty of industrial espionage and that there was therefore no longer any way for them to return home. Added to this, Bauwens quickly got rid of them, as soon as he had finished training cheaper local labour. On November 12, 1798, when he had just taken on board the last pieces of the mule-jenny and had recruited, with a view to setting up with their help a new spinning mill in Ghent, around forty English spinners, foremen and mechanics, the wife of one of the foremen spilled the beans to the police. The ship bound for Hamburg, in which Bauwens had to hastily embark, was pursued by several British ships as far as the coast of Germany; In Hamburg, the British demanded that Bauwens be delivered to them, and only renounced this in exchange for many gold coins. His English home was searched, a price placed on his head and his property seized. His accomplices were sentenced to prison terms and heavy fines.
Nevertheless, he managed to piece together missing parts and make the mule-jenny operational. His brother François then began producing more than 2,000 mule jennys in Paris. A copy of this mechanical spinner is on display at the Museum of Industrial Archaeology and Textiles , established in a former cotton mill in the north of Kuip, Ghent.
Several of Bauwens' sisters married other major industrialists: the Heyndrickx, Guinard, Heyman, and cotton printer De Vos. To these industrialists, but also to other textile barons, such as the Lousbergs and the Rosseels, Lieven Bauwens, sold his machines. At the same time, at the beginning of 1800, he opened a mechanical spinning mill in Ghent (Fratersplein). With 25 spinning mills and 15 weaving factories, a vertical cotton industry was established in Ghent, before 1812. Liévin Bauwens was therefore at the origin of a spectacular industrial and demographic boom in his hometown, soon nicknamed the Belgian Manchester.
In 1802, 700 - 800 inmates of the provincial prison in Ghent, worked on his behalf. A similar system was also put in place in Vilvoorde and Hemiksem. In 1805, he set up a third cotton spinning mill in Tronchiennes, this time using steam engines. He also owned a factory in the abbey of Géronsart, near Namur.
He was awarded the Légion d'honneur by Napoleon in 1810.
From 1811, as the continental blockade took effect, the Ghent cotton industry began to decline. Bauwens suffered considerable losses and was forced to lay off half of his staff. But even worse than the blockade was its lifting, which exposed the continent to British competition; the Napoleonic Empire was coming to an end and Bauwens could not avoid bankruptcy and had to abandon his factories to his creditors and retire to Paris, where in 1819 he developed of a new method for processing floche silk. He transferred his patent to Baron d'Idelot, in return for an annual annuity, and founded a silk spinning mill in Paris in 1819.
Bauwens died unexpectedly on 17 March 1822, at the age of 53.
The above information is condensed from the Wikipedia entry, accessed 26 April 2024.