The Art of Inventing and the Inventor as Artist: Intellectual Property at the Great Exhibition

Abstract

In May 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was held at Hyde Park in London, England. There was so much in this Exhibition that was copied, imitated, die-cast, lithographed, electroplated, stereotyped, daguerreotyped, galvano-plastic, and so on, that the Exhibition itself posed questions about the relationship of monetary to aesthetic value and the status of the ‘real’ and ‘original’ in an emerging economy of reproduction and imitation. This chapter argues that the reform of the patent law at mid-19th century was profoundly affected by a literary lobby, including Charles Dickens and other members of the Society of Arts, which maintained the analogies with copyright law despite the evidence that industrial innovation had now become a largely corporate, and not an individual, endeavour. The chapter shows the crucial importance of the close juxtaposition of artworks and machines at the Exhibition of 1851 to the subsequent discussion of the status and intellectual property of artists and inventors.