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What was convincing about all this, in the end, was its conviction and sweep as social theory. It allied theworker-artisan, the public, and the new nature of science and technology, tying all of them to the doctrines of political economy. And out of the mix it conjured a kind of utopia. Should the campaign fall short of absolute success, moreover, the abolitionists were prepared to countenance intermediate steps on the way to their promised freedom. The most noteworthy-although MacFie was reluctant to endorse it wholly-was for so-called compulsory licensing. This idea seems to have originated as a serious proposition in the 1830s, although predecessors can be traced back into the eighteenth century.The ideawas that, after a few years of exclusivity, a patentee would be obliged to grant licenses to all who requested them, at a royalty rate decreed by a government agency. In fact, the British government already practiced a kind of compulsory licensing for itself, in the sphere of military procurement. Having found patentees' demands excessive, since the Crimean War the War Ministry had insisted on setting its own royalty rates. More than that, it often effectively laid aside the "rights" of patentees-including, significantly enough, Armstrong's. By what hypocrisy, the abolitionist side asked, could the state adopt such tactics for itselfwhile denying them to the citizenry? Compulsory licensing schemes of one kind or another (generally rather vaguelyworked out) were therefore examined by almost every inquiry to look at patents, and the BAAS recommended that they be adopted. The most plausible version was one identified with a MacFie ally, engineer John Scott Russell, that was modeled on the monopolies that Parliament gave to railway companies on certain routes. In return for exclusive rights, rail companies guaranteed to run trains for working passengers, at appropriate times and affordable fares. Russell proposed that this principle of access and maximal pricing be adopted for patents too.38 But no compulsory licensing policywas in fact adopted until after the end of the century, and even then on a very limited scale. The biggest pitfall was held to be the need to evaluate inventions' worth in order to assign a royalty rate. This, it was thought, presented insurmountable problems of equity and epistemology, since nobody could predict the value of an invention ahead of the market. Russell's idea therefore went nowhere-but it would be resurrected, as we shall see, by a later and altogether shiftier "king of the pirates."

THE INVENTORS' INSTITUTE AND THE INVENTION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The appropriation of free trade political economy to an antipatenting cause was not inevitable. All of the principal earlier political economists had been prepared to reconcile free trade and laissez-faire doctrines with an endorsement of patenting, even if some had done so through gritted philosophical teeth. Adam Smith had done this, as had the elder Ricardo, Bentham, Babbage, and McCulloch. John Stuart Mill maintained this position into the i86os. Mill spoke out briefly but strongly: to abolish patents, he declared, would "enthrone free stealing under the prostituted name of free trade." It would leave "men of brains" helpless in the face of "men of money-bags."39 These positions, as much moral and class based as political or economic, would eventually become the basis for a desperate and determined defense of patenting.

The strength of the movement to abolish patents came as a surprise. Defenders of patentingwere slow to mobilize. But at length a small band, determined to stem the tide, convened a body that they christened the Inventors' Institute to fight back. The Institute's moving force was none other than the now aged Sir David Brewster. Brewster's nostalgic remarks in these years about his failed earlyplans for the BAAS sometimes seemed to imply that he thought of the new Institute as everything he had always wanted that earlier body to be. At first it had only three members.