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By Root 2029 0

his genius" of £300-£40o for it. There was no possible justification for this tax, Brewster maintained, since patents offered no real protection, and could only be affirmed as property by surviving hugely expensive lawsuits. The contrast with copyright was stark. A literary author obtained protection straightforwardly, and so, Brewster affirmed, "piracy is almost unknown" in the realm of print (an implausible view, incidentally, but let that pass). The inventor of a machine, on the other hand, must labor long and hard, "either in the dark or with the assistance of tried friends, lest some pirate robs him of his idea, and brings it earlier into use." The cost of applying for a patent, and still more that of defending it against such pirates, counted as an absolute barrier to poor inventors. Even if it had not, it would be a lucky man indeed who evaded the "pirates who lie in wait for the poor man's inventions." Far from encouraging invention, consequently, the system in fact served to debar "nine-tenths of those individuals who are most capable of advancing the interests of the arts." Whitehall's clerks and judges, on the other hand, benefited handsomely from their fees. The whole thing, Brewster concluded, was itselfpiratical: it cast the state's officials as "a legalized banditti."

Brewster thought that this bandit law threatened British industrial power. "Bribed by foreign gold," he warned, Britain's artisans were departing for foreign nations, taking with them their inventions and skills. The kind of invitation extended by Mathew Carey and others from America was, Brewster believed, all too effective. Britain's continued industrial might therefore depended on dealing not just with the decline of science, on the one hand, but, on the other, with the deeper "evil" of the patents regime. For the sciences, he wanted chairs established at universities for "men of genius," honors for scientific practitioners, and the provision of financial rewards through learned societies that would become "the scientific advisers to the crown." For patenting, more radically, he argued that privileges should be as easy to affirm as copyrights. This would effectively mean abolishing application fees altogether. One of three "scientific boards," based in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, would instead appraise each application, and if the specification were deemed adequate and the invention judged to be new then the inventor would get absolute protection for fourteen years. An inventor could still take out a patent even without such approval, but at his or her own risk. With all this put in place, Brewster affirmed, the "inventive genius" of the nation could spring forth once again and the temptations of emigration could be countered.

But constructing a modern patent system would be hard work. Brewster's manifesto was itself prompted partly by the failure of the 1829 parliamentary committee even to issue a recommendation. He therefore reasoned that what was needed first and foremost was political agitation. He nurtured the hope that the Royal Society would undertake this task; but before it would do so it would have to be reformed, and there seemed little chance of this happening. He therefore called for anew body to take up the cause - an "association," as he called it, "of our nobility, clergy, gentry, and philosophers." It would be modeled on a contemporary German congress for natural history and Naturphilosophie, a meeting ofwhich Babbage had attended. Brewster hoped that a new association of this kind would both impel the reform of patents and, almost as important, inspire the nation's aristocrats to take up their proper role as "patrons of genius."

Brewster's call for a new association, as is well known, marked the origin of what became the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Agitation about patenting was one of the new body's prime purposes. He wanted it to launch itself forthwith into a campaign for reform, telling allies that since Brougham was now lord chancellor they could expect a favorable reception. Yet the Association