From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Surprisingly, patents are nowhere as central to the history of scientific instruments as they are to the history of technology. It will take much archival work to fill such an historiographical gap. My goal here is substantially more modest: to outline some patterns and chronological trends emerging from a comparison of printed patent rolls up to 1800 (which I am making available electronically) and other tactics used by instrument makers and designers to protect their businesses and authorship. My definition of instrument is capacious. I consider mathematical, optical, and philosophical instruments, but also include evidence about clocks, calculating machines, globes, and maps. Defining ‘patent’ and ‘inventor’ within the chronological and geographical boundaries of this study is, however, a more difficult matter. Not only are modern patents profoundly different from early modern privileges (which are nevertheless customarily referred to as “patents” in anglophone literature), but the role and form of privileges underwent changes in the 1500–1800 period discussed here. For simplicity’s sake, I use the terms ‘privilege’ and ‘patent’ interchangeably while also highlighting the differences between modern intellectual property and early modern privileges whenever relevant. I take a similarly pragmatic approach to the definition of inventor, which I equate to that of patent-holder while specifying, when important, whether that person was a designer or a producer, a maker or an investor, or whether inventorship was individual or multiple. Early modern mathematical and natural philosophical texts were usually assigned to one single author (whose shadow may have erased other technicians and contributors), but we will see that it was not uncommon for instrument patents to be shared by a group of inventors, each bringing different skills and resources. Multi-inventorship, it seems, predates multi-authorship. A question informing much of this essay concerns what the use of patents and other forms of protection can tell us about the early instrument makers’ and designers’ evolving markets, business practices, international mobility, relations with craft guilds, and changing sense of property in their instruments. A second question concerns the changing nature of the credit attached to instrument making and design. Instruments sit uneasily between the two main early modern systems of credit: one based on priority and publication (rewarded with symbolic, “philosophical” credit), and one based on the exchange of objects or labour for money. Many instruments were sold, but others — like Galileo’s telescope or Tycho’s apparatus — remained proprietary and often tightly guarded. They gained credit for their makers through