Court and controversy: patenting science in the nineteenth century

Abstract

In the autumn of 1851, on the occasion of the American Institute of New York's annual fair, the Boston chemist and geologist Charles Jackson chose as the subject of his address the ‘Encouragement and Cultivation of the Sciences in the United States’. Playing on popular enthusiasm for science and technology, Jackson rehearsed the wondrous progress of the arts and the role of science in that progress. Science was the ‘Hand-maiden of the Arts’, and most assuredly the ‘maid of honor’, he declared, for science was the ‘progressive power’ which inspired new inventions. These were commonplace assumptions of the time, and surely no one in his audience would have disputed them.