In 1998, Boss Number Two hired Liu and took the blueprints to Qingsui Machinery Manufacture Company, in Guangzhou, which custom-built the assembly line. Initially, the new Machine didn't work—nobody's memory is perfect, after all—but two months of adjustments solved the problems. Shangang Keji began producing bra rings, but then Liu found Boss Number Three, at a company called Jinde. Every time Liu jumped, he demanded money for his blueprints and expertise; some believe he made as much as $20,000.

Without knowing it, the man was following a path blazed by other societies that had also experienced sudden manufacturing booms. In 1810, a wealthy American named Francis Cabot Lowell traveled to England, where he used his connections to tour the world's premier textile mills. British law forbade the export of machinery or blueprints, but Lowell had an excellent memory. He returned to the United States, where, in the words of his business partner, he re-invented the Cartwright loom. Lowell became an American hero, with a Massachusetts factory town named in his honor.

Nearly two centuries later, Liu Hongwei's luck ran out when he tried to switch to Boss Number Four. According to a former co-worker, Number Three put a $12,000 bounty on Liu's head, and he fled. "I know that Jinde was looking for him, and they were angry," said Gu Hong, a Qingsui business manager who had helped custom-build the Machine. "He disappeared."

The industry, though, had already been changed. In the five years after Liu's reinvention, the bra-ring price dropped by 60 percent. Today, more than 20 Chinese companies manufacture the object, and the Machine is available to anybody with $65,000. Previously, all major manufacturers had been concentrated in the south, but now Boss Gao and Boss Wang hoped to be the first to make rings in Zhejiang.

On the day they tested the Machine, the temperature refused to budge, and the men took turns standing on the stepladder and dumping buckets of boiling water over the gas canisters. Half an hour later, steam filled the room, and they had discovered a new axiom: Pouring boiling water on natural gas canisters has no effect on the production of bra rings.

After four hours of testing, they gave up. In the end, Mechanic Luo disassembled the Machine, replaced a key part, and moved the burners closer to the assembly line. It took nearly two weeks. Some sections of the Machine had to be jury-rigged with plywood and string; they never reattached the melted handle. "The blueprints still aren't very good," Mechanic Luo explained. Years ago, he had worked alongside Liu Hongwei, and he said the same things about the technology thief that I heard from others. Liu was tall, devious, and from Sichuan Province. People speculated that Liu wasn't his real name, and they had never met his wife or child. Nobody had any idea where the man had gone.