Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [148]
The kaleidoscope was an immediate and spectacular popular success. Within a few months, perhaps two hundred thousand had been sold, in Paris as well as London. It was a sensation on a scale with no real precedent in the eighteenth century. Brewster told his wife that "no book and no instrument in the memory of man ever produced such a singular effect." But this very success became a major source of disgruntlement for Brewster. Thousands of "poor people" were making and selling the devicesnone of whom was paying him for the privilege, and none incorporating the precise scientific elements that Brewster insisted upon (such as the ability to change the angle of the internal mirrors). As a result, not only was he losing out, but his intended aim in promoting the device was being betrayed.
Brewster's decision to get a patent was nothing very unusual by this time. The practice had grown in the eighteenth century as the Industrial Revolution accelerated, and the first printed survey of patent law had appeared in 1803.4 It was about to be instrumental in the elevation of what had once been called (and denigrated as) "projectors" into an admired class of "inventors." That elevation was at least as consequential as the far-better-known shift from "natural philosophers" to "scientists." Indeed, it could be said that the Industrial Revolution emerged as a transition from the age of projects to the age of invention. The pivotal figure in this transformation wasJames Watt, who had staunchly defended his patented steam engine and was apotheosized after his death in i8i9. Yet there was still not really such a thing as a patents system in Britain. Each grant was still an individual grace proffered by the Crown out of its goodwill. Obtaining one was an expensive and dauntingly bureaucratic operation. It took at least ten discrete steps, and applicants had to go through a long series of clerks' offices with fees levied at every one; the process had originated in Tudor legislation intended to secure an income for clerks.5 The application took months and cost about £35o even in uncontroversial cases. Specialist "patent agents" made a living by shepherding claims past the various hurdles; they were usually engineers and projectors familiar with the intricacies from their own experience. Perhaps only these agents really knew the entire process. By the late nineteenth century they would receive a royal charter, making theirs a recognized profession.
Furthermore, a patent once obtained was often nothing more than a license to litigate. It provided no protection for a successful invention unless the patentee were prepared to defend it in lengthy, costly, and risky court battles, often against competitors with vastly greater resources. By the mid-nineteenth century, campaigners for reform could cite examples in which apatentee's legal costs had risen above £io,ooo. Even successful patentees were fairly likely to find themselves ruined, or at least tied up in court for years, enmeshed in a tangle of precedents and procedural arcana that had accreted over a long period. Worst of all, they complained, issues that were often highly technical- to do with the design of a steam engine, say, or the properties of a smelter-would be subjected in court to the illinformed opinions of lay judges. It became commonplace to liken the whole thing to that most eighteenth-century of plausible swindles, a lottery. Some patentees won, others lost; nothing much more than chance seemed to govern which. The problem was therefore moral as well as scientific and economic. Patents made workaday inventors into "speculators," gamblers, or "schemers," staking themselves