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…
Phillipp Reis (1861)
Antonio Meucci (1874)
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
b) Thompson - The Master Patent
The Bell Edison
United Telephone
Company versus
S.P.Thompson’s ‘New Telephone Company’
Times, Dec 21 1886
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