Our 19th Century Patent System

19th century South America

This basic socio-cultural framework, with all its inherent ambivalences and contradictions, emerged during the colonial era and exercised a deep and lasting impact on the political, economic and social structure of the new South American nations. Only after many decades was the impact blurred by the action of other external influences, change occurring from within, and a growing sense of nation...

The 19th Century

Coulomb, Carl Friedrich Gauss, André Marie Ampère, and Michael Faraday discovered the four experimental laws concerning electricity and magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell added the displacement current and thereby created the great set of Maxwell’s equations. That view is not entirely wrong, but it obscures the subtle interplay between sophisticated geometrical and physical intuitions that led not ...

A Patent System for the 21 Century

How Do Patent Laws Influence Innovation? Evidence from 19th-Century World Fairs

Studies of innovation have focused on the effects of patent laws on the number of innovations but ignored effects on the direction of technological change. This paper introduces a new data set of close to fifteen thousand innovations at the Crystal Palace World’s Fair in 1851 and at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 to examine the effects of patent laws on the direction of innovation. The paper...

Chronicle of Datura Toxicity in the 18th and 19th Century

Background: Datura stramonium is a poisonous and common flowering plant that is a member of the Solanacae family. Datura poisonings are a rare occurrence in the 21st century, making toxicological information on this plant sparse. Historical information on Datura provides useful information on the clinical symptoms and characteristics of poisonings. This review looks at the state of knowledge on...