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By Root 2057 0

created the country's first patents system, as opposed to the rather ad hoc cluster of conventions that had obtained before that. But the success proved double-edged. It triggered the emergence of a full-blooded campaign, not to update patenting, but to abolish it altogether-and then, some of its more bullish protagonists urged, to destroy copyright too. What had begun as an effort at reform had become something far more serious and far more fundamental. And the abolitionist campaign rapidly won influential converts, among them the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the electrical researcher and jurist William Robert Grove, and several of the nation's highest-ranking legal officials. Above all, the arms magnate Sir William Armstrong and the sugar capitalist Robert MacFie acted as the leaders, icons, and organizers of the movement. There were spells during the ensuing decades in which draft legislation was being introduced almost everyyear.2 Many in the 186os and 1870s believed that the abolitionist forces were on the verge of triumphing. Had they done so, then the world's dominant imperial and industrial power would have taken the initiative to extend radical laissez-faire principles into the very activity of invention. Industrial creativity would have fallen to free trade. And subsequent scientific, industrial, and economic history would surely have looked very different indeed.

Not only were the stakes in these patent debates very high, but the debates themselves ranged more widely than might have been anticipated. They embraced prolonged exchanges about the nature of discovery and invention, about how the propensity to make discoveries was distributed in the social order (in particular, whether a "class" of workman inventors existed or could exist), about whether "inventors" could be distinguished from fraudulent, deluded, or opportunistic exploiters (often termed "schemers"), and about the rewards that any such inventors might or might not deserve. At the same time they probed the use and abuse of scientific expertise to bolster or question claims in the law courts in general, not just in patents cases. From that point, they extended to issues of the nature of scientific evidence, culminating in suggestions that Britain should create a discrete court machinery to deal with issues demanding scientific testimony. It was partly in this light that the struggles over patents converged with others to redefine the very identity and authority of the scientist as a recognized social species.

LEGAL BANDITRY AND THE DECLINE OF SCIENCE

We should begin with a patent. In mid-1817, the Scottish evangelical naturalist and editor David Brewster (1781-1868) filed an application for one, setting in train events that would culminate in the climactic contest almost exactly half a century later. It applied to a new optical device that he christened the kaleidoscope. This was one of many instruments that Brewster had devised or improved in the course of years of painstaking research on light, some ofwhich he had earlier patented. But the kaleidoscope was a different kind of device. It was not intended for scientific researches by philosophers, but for what Georgian England called "rational amusement." In other words, it was one of countless machines made and marketed at this time to middle-class consumers to provoke wonder and encourage reflection by the user. Such machines circulated in a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and very competitive world of goods. Emerging out of the world of mid-eighteenth-century lecturing that had created the orrery, the automaton, and the Microcosm-and that had been so pivotal to the advent of copyright- they too made use of spectacle, artistry, and revelation to sell themselves and the reputations of their makers. But they were also meant, and taken, seriously as instruments. Brewster himself believed that he was contributing to the education of a popular discernment in sight. For example, he thought the kaleidoscope would illuminate principles of symmetry that pervaded the natural world and were central to good