Claiming ownership in the technosciences: Patents, priority and productivity

Intellec tual property (IP) in and around the sciences is nowadays a matter of high public as well as historical interest. Here we propose an integrative concept of IP that, drawing upon insights scattered across decades of scholarship, forges from them a framew ork for a new style of historical research. This expanded concept of IP takes in patents, copyright and other legal instruments (or their surrogates)— IP in a narrow sense—but also other kinds of ownership claims relevan t in the sciences—IP in a broad sense. The latter include priority claims and what are here called productivity claims, made when a body of theoretical principles is asserted to underpin useful techniques and technologies. Attention to the interactio n of patent, priority and productivity claims promises to lead historians to new que stions, answers, and sources, as attested in the papers gathered in this special issue, on three technosciences (electrical science, aeronautics, agricultural botany) in Great Britain in the decades around 1900. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosoph y of Science 1. Intellectual property and historians of science, then and now It was new inventions that brought most visitors to the old Patent Office Library in London. Housed from the early twentieth century in a sumptuous gallery-style building near Chancery Lane, the Library mainly served inventors and patent agents who wanted to know the details of freshly patented inventions, to discover whether their ideas had been anticipated, or to prepare a case for litigation. A Russian physicist visiting in early summer 1931 had something else in mind. Boris Hessen, Director of the Moscow Institute of Physics, was then in London as part of an eight-member delegation from the Soviet Union to an international congress taking place at the Science Museum (home of the Patent Office’s erstwhile other collection, the mid-nine teenth-century Patent Museum). The meeting was on the history of science and technology, and the Soviet papers sought to showcase dialectical materialism as the key to rethinking science’s past as well as its present. They were scheduled, however, for the very end of the congress, and more than a few presentations were notable for what another participa nt, the journalist J. G. Crowther, described as their ‘‘antiquarian spirit’’ (with plenty of ‘‘reminiscence s from the elderly, and trivia from obscure amateurs ’’). The temptation to miss a few sessions must have been strong. In any event, Hessen’s own paper dealt with the history of English science, and there was, as he explained to Crowther, more research to be done. ‘‘Hessen was most anxious to visit the Patents Office Library,’’ Crowther later recalled, ‘‘to see historical material bearing on the influence on British science of patents of the Newtonian period and earlier . . . I took him to the Librarian there.’’ Hessen’s paper, entitled ‘‘The social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia,’’ was immediately recognized as the outstanding contributi on from the Soviet side. It took aim at the heroic image 0039-3681/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2012.11.010 E-mail addresses: [email protected] (C. MacLeod), [email protected] (G. Radick) 1 Crowther (1970, pp. 76–80), quotations on pp. 77, 80. Not all the sessions were as bad as the worst; the morning of Thursd ay 2 July, for example, saw thoughtful, historically and scientifically well-informed papers in philosophy of biology from speakers including J. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, E. S. Russell, J. H. Woodger, and Lancelot Hogben—classy biologists all (W. E. Ritter Papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley). We are grate ful to Maurizio Esposito for this reference and for helpful discussion. On the Soviet delegation and the congress generally, see Crowther (1941, pp.614–617), Werskey (1971, 1978, pp. 138–149). On Hessen and his contr ibution, see also Schaffer (1984), Graham (1985), and Chilvers (2003, 2007). On the Patent Office Library, see Hewish (2000, pp. 147–159), also British Library [n.d.] ; Intellectua l Prop erty Office [n.d.] . For a photograph of the old library, see Archimage [n.d.] . For the Patent Office Museum, see Hewish (2000, pp. 115–146), MacLeo d (2007, pp. 259–263). Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 188–201