Social Construction of Invention through Patent Management: Thomas Blanchard’s Woodworking Machinery

Abstract

Social Construction of Invention through Patent Management: Thomas Blanchard’s Woodworking Machinery CAROLYN C. COOPER Invention in the United States in the 19th century was to a significant degree socially constructed through patent management. By social construction of invention I mean not only the social shaping ofspecific inventions but also, at a deeper level, the determining of the very rules by which people defined “newness” in inventions. Since originality is the defining characteristic of any invention, the gradual social formation of decision rules for originality was tantamount to defining invention itself. Of course, we recognize that not all inventions received patents. Still, all patents were, by definition, for inventions. Publicly acknowl­ edged patented inventions provided powerful standards for recogni­ tion of nonpatented inventions also. In the course of managing patents, persons interacted so as to constitute an important social subsystem to which our society allocated the continuing task of defining “invention,” that is, originality or newness in man-made objects. These interactions determined features of particular pat­ ented devices, and over time they defined and redefined implicit rules forjudging whether a proposed invention was really new. The Rationale and Evolution of a Patent System Thomas Blanchard (1788—1864) was a Massachusetts farm boy who became an inventor of machinery, most notably the irregular turning lathe. He was able to make a career of inventing because the society in which he lived—the 19th-century United States—gave him Dr. Cooper is currently a visiting scholar at the National Museum of American History. This article draws on her book, Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1991). She is grateful— for comments, suggestions, and encouragement—to Kendall Dood, Robert Gordon, Eda Kranakis, Judith McGaw, Richard R. Nelson, William N. Parker, Deborah Warner, and the T&C referees.© 1991 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/91/3204-0010$01.00 960 Social Construction of Invention through Patent Management 961 material reward as well as fame for his acts of invention.1 Not all societies have so rewarded their inventors, but modern Western ones have tended to do so.2 From this we can infer that these societies have generally approved of invention and intended to encourage it. From the point of view of a society intending to encourage invention by rewarding inventors, it is important that the reward be sufficient for such encouragement but not excessive. It is also important that particular inventions, once made, should not disappear from view but should become part of the society’s available stock of technology. Thus, the optimal social system to satisfy these criteria is one that holds out the maximum credible prospect of reward to a potential inventor to induce him to make an invention and to share it with society, but one that then gives him the minimum actual reward consistent with continued credibility. Sometimes, as in prerevolutionary France, modern Western societ­ ies have chosen to award prizes out of public funds directly to the inventors who have persuaded designated judges (such as the Acad­ émie des Sciences in Paris) that their invention deserves approval.3 Since the early 17th century, however, the usual English and Ameri­ can way of rewarding invention has been less direct: these societies have given inventors an opportunity to earn reward through the private economy, by granting them a patent—a temporary monopoly on the making, use, and sale of a new device—in return for describing it so fully that anyone “skilled in the art” can understand it.4 The patent has thus acquired two functions: one is to define and publicize what is original about an invention, and the other is to turn the ‘In addition to money and fame, Fritz Machlup has identified three other motivations for invention: fun, service to mankind, and Veblen’s “instinct of workmanship.” See “The Supply of Inventors and Inventions,” in The Rate and Direction ofInventive Activity: Economic and SocialFactors, ed. Richard R. Nelson (Princeton, N.J., 1962), p. 144. In the present discussion, money and fame are what the social system can provide directly as rewards for invention; the other motivations are possibly also social in...