Making Inventions Patent

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Making Inventions Patent CAROLYN C. COOPER Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day one could discover a new art. . . indeed they are being found all the time. [Fra Giordano of Pisa, February 23, 1306] Fra Giordano went on to tell the faithful assembled that day in Florence’s Santa Maria Novella that only twenty years earlier “there was discovered the art of making spectacles which help you to see well, and which is one of the best and most necessary in the world. ... I myself saw the man who discovered and practiced it, and I talked with him.” Lynn White, jr., considered that this sermon by a Dominican monk not only provided “our best evidence of the invention of eyeglasses in the 1280s” but also “sang the praises of the recent invention of invention.” It demonstrated that by the early 14th century Europe had “arrived at a technological attitude toward problem solving which was to become of inestimable importance for the human condition.”1 More than 600 years later, eminent engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush, testifying in 1939 before the Temporary National Economic Committee in Washington, D.C., struggled to communicate his idea (and Fra Giordano’s) of the dynamism of Western technology. The metaphor he found appropriate was that of an endless frontier of knowledge. His interlocutors were concerned about the character of the exploration parties on that frontier: Was it fair to the lone scouts that corporations were increasingly sending out bigger, bettersupplied expeditions into the technological unknown? Further, which kind of expedition—individual or collective—more effectively pro­ vided American society with the better technology? Although Fra Giordano and Vannevar Bush shared a vocabulary of discovery in describing invention, much had happened, of course, to Dr. Cooper, currently a visiting scholar at the National Museum of American History, is guest editor for this issue. 'Lynn White,jr., “Cultural Climates and Technological Advance in the Middle Ages,” in his Medieval Religion and Technology (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), p. 221.© 1991 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/91/3204-0011$01.00 837 838 Carolyn C. Cooper change technology in the intervening six centuries, including the rise of the nation-state and of modern science. Along the way, Westerners had become self-conscious about invention and had come to see it not as a random gift of the gods but as a human activity that was amenable to social manipulation, to some extent. They attempted to devise institutional inducements for invention. Important among these was the institution of patents. The authors of this issue of Technology and Culture look at patents from several angles. They variously view patent systems as historical outcomes of changes in culturally imbedded Western attitudes toward creative activity in general and technical creativity in particular; as differing across cultures (e.g., France, Great Britain, and the United States); and as evolving from previous systems (e.g., in France) that had similar intentions and effects in some respects. Inside a given society (the United States) they describe 19th-century patent manage­ ment as intersecting several other social subsystems—legal, economic, political, and intellectual; as subject to excesses of patent-management behavior (i.e., abuse of the system) that provoked changes in patent rules; as shaped, through the legal system, by political-economic interests. They view American patent records as sources of informa­ tion about invention and inventors, both as collectivities and as individuals, and warn of shortcomings in the records for those purposes. They raise questions about the relevance of the patent system to a historically important class of inventions (railroad equip­ ment) and describe the discourse of an attempted but abortive reform of the American patent system in the mid-20th century. In her essay on history of invention, authorship, intellectual prop­ erty, and the origin of patents, Pamela Long strips away anachronistic modern assumptions concerning the “natural law” basis of patents in intellectual property rights. Instead she traces from Greek and Roman antiquity into the Renaissance the evidence for the late medieval formation in occidental societies of authorship in writings, visual arts, and technical crafts. Only once...