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By Root 1892 0

But by 1866 that had grown to five hundred, and it was angling to become a permanent chartered body, to stand alongside the Royal Society and the BAAS as a new trinity at the pinnacle of British science and technology (1866 was also the year that saw the founding of the first English university research laboratories in experimental physics, in Oxford and London; ten such laboratories would appear by 1874, to pursue this industrially consequential science.) It launched its own journal, the Scientific Review, which Brewster employed liberally to assail the abolitionists. Significantly enough, he often did so in language lifted directly from his articles of more than thirty years before: the lines about the patent laws being "vicious and fraudulent" and turning legal officials into a "banditti," for example, returned verbatim. In every monthly issue the Scientific Review carried on the fight. For example, it lamented the Admiralty's decision to appropriate patented weaponry under a compulsory license scheme as a form of "Fourierism" that threatened to justify state robbery in general. It saw this as heralding a concerted campaign to abolish patents on the quiet, and warned that more than half the patents commonly supposed to exist had already been quietly obliterated.40

Brewster and the Scientific Review did not argue that the patents system should be preserved unchanged. On the contrary, he called it a "monster evil," that taxed genius and submitted it to the whims of "utterly incompetent" judges. It needed "radical change." But whereas the abolitionists thought it a burden on the public that must be swept away, Brewster and his allies thought that what made it evil was precisely its weakness and expense to the inventor; they wanted it strengthened and its reach extended. They maintained a view of the issue that was if anything higher and more uncompromising than anything deemed plausible since 1774. Inventors, they held, had a natural right to their inventions; so too, they sometimes added, did "men of science" to their discoveries-that is, researchers should be able to patent facts. Because of the risk of "pirates," this right should get legal protection for at least twenty-one years, and preferably the inventor's lifetime. It should be obtainable without any fee at all, like copyright protection. Once ratified by a scientific panel, it should be "absolutely secured" from legal challenge. And it should be sustained across the entire empire. Civilization itself was at stake. Brewster ventured into an apocalyptic mode to make that point. "Withdraw from circulation the secular productions of the press that are hoarded in all the libraries of the world," he argued, "and society will hardly suffer from the change. Withdraw the gifts with which art and science have enriched us- the substantial realities through which we live, and move, and enjoy our being- and society collapses into barbarism."41

The fundamental stance of the Scientific Review, however, was that intellectual creativity, whether literary, scientific, or technological, was essentially one thing. It therefore merited equal treatment whatever its manifestation-and that treatment was the strong, readily obtainable protection exemplified by copyright. The magazine reprinted Trollope's call for international copyright with the United States, for example, not because it wanted to enter that particular battle, but because it wanted to demonstrate that Trollope's cause was essentially the same as its own. "Viewing all intellectual rights as equal," Brewster proclaimed, "and regarding them as sacred and unalienable as any other species of property, we maintain that they should be put upon the same footing."The Scientific Review in fact-along with like-minded organs such as The Engineerbecame one of the very first forums in which a reader could consistently encounter references to such a universal and uniform kind of property that existed across media. It called this entity, in Brewster's own words, "intellectual property."42 And "intellectual property," according to the