INAUGURAL LECTURE:

Owning and disowning invention

Problems of knowledge, integrity and technology

Professor Graeme J.N. Gooday,

Centre for History & Philosophy of Science,

Department of Philosophy

Owning and Disowning Invention: Intellectual Property, Authority and

Identity in British Science and Technology, 1880-1920

AHRC funded collaborative research project 2007-10

Project team:

Graeme Gooday & Stathis Arapostathis (Leeds)

- history of electrical technology

Greg Radick & Berris Charnley (Leeds)

- history of plant breeding

Christine MacLeod & Jon Hopwood-Lewis

(Bristol) – history of aeronautics

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)

Mirror galvanometer

Silvanus Phillips Thompson

Valve telephone c.1885.

Oliver Heaviside

Heaviside’s elegant reformulation of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetic propagation.

Oliver Lodge

Lodge’s 1897 syntonic wireless system

Bell’s First US patent 174,465, “Improvement in telegraphy”, 1876

?US Patent 240, 566 1930

Refrigerator with no moving parts and requiring no supply of electricity

US Patent 240, 566 1930

Refrigerator with no moving parts and requiring no supply of electricity

Henry Newman I consider, then, that I am chargeable with no paradox, when I speak of a Knowledge which is its own end, when I call it liberal knowledge, or a gentleman's knowledge, when I educate for it, and make it the scope of a University.

‘Knowledge its Own End’ The Idea of a University (1858)

Statute of Monopolies of 1624

Section 6 declared unlawful all monopolies except…

“…that any declaration beforementioned shall not extend to any letters patents and grants of privilege for the term of fourteen years or under, hereafter to be made, of the sole working or making of any manner of new manufactures within this realm, to the true and first inventor and inventors of such manufactures’

Sir Clifford Allbutt’s clinical thermometer

Oliver & Mary Lodge & their 12 children

Famous Inventors in telecommunications?

The telephone –

The filament light bulb –

The radio –

Lewis Howard Latimer among the G.E. Experts team

Some inventors of ‘the telephone’ before Bell…

Antonio Meucci (1874)Phillipp Reis (1861) Elisha Gray (1876)

The tribulations of patents in

early telecommunications

Four short case studies

a) Thomson: Patentability & secrecy

Philadelphia Exhibition 1876: Bell demonstrates articulating telephone (US patent March 7th) – Thomson witnesses

S.P.Thompson’s ‘New Telephone Company’

Times, Dec 21 1886

b) Thompson - The Master Patent

The Bell Edison

United Telephone Company versus

c) Heaviside - ‘Philanthropic’ publication

Heaviside’s condition of distortionless transmission

Pupin’s patented loading coil

Lodge’s syntony vs Marconi monopolism

CONCLUSIONS

Some lessons from the troubled

past of academic patenting