Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [157]
Two other figures besides MacFie stood out as leaders of the antipatent campaign. One was William Robert Grove, a well-known electrical researcher turned barrister. Grove's voice carried authority. He knew very well the most lucrative new science of the age, telegraphy, and the one in which patents promised to be most influential. He often presented himself as more a skeptic about patenting than an out-and-out abolitionist. In i86o, most notably, he published a well-regarded proposal for an entirely new court dedicated to both the granting of patents and the trying of cases resulting from them; he envisaged that it might also extend its remit to copyright, and to all cases "of a scientific character." It was probably the most plausible such proposal among the many put forward in these years. In some ways it was daring: Grove's court would have the authority to reject patents for trivial improvements, for example, and to determine how long each patent should endure based on the needs and worth of the invention, both of these powers being anathema to the pro-patent camp. But he also insisted that its judges should be barristers, not men of science, and that it should have a jury-in both respects adopting a more conservative view than many of the reformers, let alone abolitionists. (His jury would be composed not of laymen, but of "manufacturers, chemists, engineers, &c.") The point, for Grove, was that his tribunal promised a return to "the spirit of the ancient patent law," as enshrined in the common law of Coke and articulated by the Statute of Monopolies. But such a court was not forthcoming, and Grove gravitated increasingly to the abolitionist camp. He at length became even more radical than MacFie. Or perhaps he was merely more fatalistic. Whereas MacFie wanted to introduce a system of state awards for deserving inventors, Grove denounced even this possibility, insisting that the state should refrain from intervening at all. He seems to have thought that the cause of the lowerclass inventor would inevitably be hopeless in the face of big capital.28
The most reliable, authoritative, and powerful antipatent campaigner of all, however, was the engineer, arms manufacturer, and inventor Sir William Armstrong (18io-i9oo). Armstrong was an iconic figure of high Victorian imperial invention (fig. io.i). Legends circulated about him, in the way that they did figures like Watt or Isaac Newton. The press pronounced him a "wizard," and he was said to have proved his inventive genius as a child to Robert Stephenson by building mechanical models. Originally trained as a lawyer, Armstrong had become an engineer in the 1840s, inventing and building hydraulic cranes for dockyards. Then the Crimean War revealed woeful deficiencies in Britain's artillery, which was still using guns similar to those of the Napoleonic era. Armstrong saw a chance to capitalize. He rapidly developed a new design of cannon. With a breech-loading mechanism and a rifled barrel, the Armstrong gun promised a radical advance (fig. 10.2). He secured a contract with the navy, on the basis of which he rapidly accrued a vast fortune. He then went on to supply many of the world's other powers too, with heavy weapons built at his vast Elswick works near Newcastle (fig. io.3). At the end of the century he would employ twenty-five thousand workers there, and his hydraulic devices would be central to the development of the Royal Navy's turreted dreadnoughts. He ploughed part of his wealth into a magnificent hydroelectric-powered mansion in Northumberland. Named Cragside, it was an astonishing edifice-an industrial Neuschwanstein. It was the single most ambitious private architectural expression ever built of high Victorian scientific-industrial enterprise (fig. 10.4). With Armstrong