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By Root 2085 0

best in Europe. Inventors and discoverers were the heroes of the age. Yet in the decades from 185o to 188o every aspect of the relation between invention, industry, and society came under the harshest examination it had ever undergone. Critics charged that the mechanism that had evolved over centuries to recognize, encourage, and reward inventors-that of patents-was outdated, inefficient, and even fundamentally ill conceived. They were at first few in number, but soon appeared in every class and all regions of the country. They claimed that it profoundly misrepresented the nature of invention, the social identity of inventors, and the place of both in a modern industrial economy. They insisted that it be not just reformed or updated, but abolished outright. And they almost won. Our own loud contests notwithstanding, the Victorian campaign against patenting-which expanded to embrace copyrights too-remains to this day the strongest ever undertaken against intellectual property.

Yet there was more to it than that. As we have seen, it had come to be accepted in the late eighteenth century that literary authorship and invention were not radically distinct kinds of thing. Both were manifestations of some common power. By an import from the German language, this common power gradually came to be called creativity. It carried with it the implication that regimes of property in creative work ought themselves to be emanations of some common underlying principle. As formal systems they should therefore interlace coherently. When patenting came under attack, hard-pressed defenders of the system found that it was only by appealing to this commitment that they could head off the assault. They saved patenting by insisting that it was but one aspect of a deeper, sweepingly fundamental principle -one with clear, distinct, and adamantine political overtones. They called that principle iutellectualproperty.

The debate about patents was not unique to any one country. Similar contests took place across Europe. In France, leading politicians, political economists, and savants weighed in on both sides. In Prussia-later the German empire-the campaign encouraged Bismarck to pronounce against the practice of patenting, which remained at a low level for decades in the German lands. In the Netherlands, the campaign actually led to the abolition of the entire patents regime. And in Switzerland, it long dissuaded the authorities from establishing one at all. OnlyAmerica among the industrial powers seems to have been largely unaffected by the furor, for a combination of particular reasons: thanks to the proselytizing of Mathew Carey's generation, the inventor had long been seen as avirtuous republican type; the patents system there had been adumbrated in the Constitution; and it was a relatively easy and affordable system for Americans to make use of' These conditions, however, were peculiar to the United States. In all other major powers the fate of patents became very much an open question. And the controversies that raged in this generation set the terms in which almost all later debates about creativity and commerce would be posed.

Great Britain was the foremost industrial power of the time, so it was in Britain that the conflict over patents was carried on most fiercely and with the most important consequences. It split the country's professional elite. Proponents and antagonists included many of the most prominent engineers and men of science, as well as lawyers, authors, philosophers, and gentlemen. And rival camps rarely ceased to badger Parliament for action. Beginning in 1829, a long series of parliamentary committees and Royal Commissions investigated the law and practice of patenting in increasingly broad terms. At first, the issue was one of reform, very much along the lines of the broader political movements beginning in the 18ios to reform structures ofgovernance and administration that had remained essentially unchanged since the seventeenth century. In 1852 one such attempt proved successful, producing a sweeping change that in effect