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whole abolitionist movement. MacFie might have been its most loquacious protagonist, but he had none of Armstrong's prestige as an inventor in his own right. Recognizing the authority that Armstrong wielded by virtue of his renown, they therefore increasingly sought to defile and destroy that image. Having profited by patents himself, they charged, he now sought to deny others the chance to do so. Worse still, they accused him ofpreaching what he practiced: for this was a man who, far from coming up with his own inventions, had in reality made his fortune as a "compiler of other men's." The Telegraph quipped that he was adept at more than one kind of rifling. He had stolen the inventions of Whitworth and Krupp, Scientific American charged, "without scruple, or even the polite `thankyou, sir' of the highwayman." The Engineer likewise devoted several editorials not only to a rebuttal of Armstrong's arguments but also to a demolition of his reputation as an inventor. Far from being one of the country's greatest inventors, it concluded, Armstrong had invented "nothing; absolutely nothing." To count him an inventor was "an injustice to the great body of inventors," to whom he was in fact a deadly enemy. His whole reputation and fortune were built on "plagiarisms." Not content with "appropriating the ideas of others right and left," concurred Scientific American, Armstrong was now seeking to "have the larceny legalized by the world."45

In particular, the Engineer and like-minded organs asserted the claim of a Royal Artillery captain, Alexander Theophilus Blakely, to be the real inventor of the rifled cannon. To see the point of this, one needs to return briefly to Armstrong's own history, and especially to his recourse to it as a kind of mythic foundation for his antipatenting claims. Armstrong liked to say that it was Brunei's withdrawal from his artillery experiments that had given rise to his own convictions against patents. As he told the BAAS in i86i-in a speech repeatedly interrupted by applause-the two had found their work obstructed by a patent that an opportunistic rival had filed only a few weeks earlier. This patentee stood to deny the British public the benefits of their experiments. The experience demonstrated, Armstrong said, the "impolicy and injustice" implicit in a regime that gave a monopoly to whichever claimant happened to get to the patent office first. And he claimed to have found that the example was representative, because, as he put it, "similarity of circumstances will constantly suggest similar ideas to different minds." A contract he had later won for a set of railway wheels, for example, had been blocked by another patent, this time one filed fourteenyears earlier and left dormant ever since. Apatents system not only subjected inventors to arace inwhich the winner took all, but provided an opportunity for avaricious projectors of "schemes""pen-and-ink inventors," as he called them-to extort money from real inventors, or even to block inventions from appearing. "This readiness to give protection to mere schemes is the bane of the system."46

In endorsing Blakely, the pro-patenting camp was challenging head-on this story ofArmstrong's, and hence both his image as the wizard inventor and his fable of patenting in general. Blakely was in fact the patentee complained of byArmstrong as having stopped his and Brunei's experiments. Far from obstructing their work, however, he and his supporters produced old correspondence indicating that he had offered to facilitate it. Having independently invented a weapon virtually identical to what became the Armstrong gun, he had wanted to submit it to military trials, and, it seemed, had approached Armstrong with a request to build a gun to his design. Armstrong had allegedly entertained the idea, but then declined, only to proceed with his own virtually identical cannon. When Blakely wrote to request royalties, Armstrong had immediately filed a patent claim with trivial differences that, as Blakely put it, seemed designed solely to "evade the words of my patent." Blakely