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By Root 1898 0

had thought of suing, only to be warned off by government officials. According to his camp, therefore, it had been Blakely who had been stymied, and not just by a patent but byArmstrong's corrupt resort to influence in high places.47 His company had been forced to give up on Britain and sell its guns instead to powers like Japan and China. Meanwhile Armstrong handed over his patents to the state, which kept them secret, and he became superintendent of the Royal Gun Factory and the government's engineer for rifled ordnance. He served in these positions until February 1863, enjoying substantial oversight of the testing of his own and rivals' guns. At the artillery range in Shoeburyness, military officials dealt with "inventors" every day- a class ofwhom even journalist Patrick Barry, who wrote an expose of the range's management, remarked, "I have always found it prudent to disbelieve them in nearly all they said." But Barry charged that it was the behemoth ofArmstrong (and, to a lesser extent, the other great Victorian arms magnate, Sir Joseph Whitworth) that forced the "struggling inventor" into deceit and subterfuge. The military and Armstrong himself, Barry reported, made apractice of rejecting any invention submitted to their testing, only to appropriate to themselves any that were in fact worthwhile. Armstrong, in short, regarded inventions either as challenges to be suppressed or as raw materials out ofwhich to "cobble" together his own designs. Even his original patents had derived from research subsidized by the state, and as such "ought to be public property."48

Authors in both Britain and America were thus not slow to accuse Armstrong of using his position to waste public money on his own, allegedly inferior, artillery solely to protect himself against rivals like Blakely and a whole class of "inventors" in gunnery. In other words, he was the true monopolist- and, at the same time, the true pirate, reigning over an institution that provided him with an endless stream of new ideas to seize upon. Patentees, by contrast, were brave individual inventors (even if their businesses were in fact large and sophisticated) who in general tested monopolists. Armstrong's cynical treatment of inventors in the patent struggle reflected his contemptuous exploitation of them on an everyday basis at Shoeburyness. In the heat of the antipatent campaign, Blakely himself even took to turning up at occasions where Armstrong was due to speak-including the BAAS in 1861-and publicly heckling him. Each time he did, he sparked loud and passionate exchanges.49

Others too now came to light who had patented similar guns before Armstrong. Foremost among them was a Harvard engineer, Daniel Treadwell, who had built and patented a gun to a similar design in the 1840s. Details of his design had been distributed to British military officials in 1848, and the patent itself had been published in 1854, shortly before Armstrong's own appearance on the scene. Treadwell entertained no doubt as to what had occurred. He told the U.S. secretary ofwar in 186o that Armstrong's gun was "a close imitation" of his own. He enterprisingly turned Armstrong's "denunciation ofpatents" before the BAAS - the speech that Blakely had attended-against its author. That speech proved, Treadwell pointed out, that Armstrong was thoroughly versed in the archive ofpatents. He therefore must have known ofTreadwell's own earlier filing. On this basis he flatly accused Armstrong of theft, and called upon Britain's engineers to repudiate his "piracy"

By the mid-i86os, then, Treadwell, Blakely, and the pro-patenting camp had created a countermyth of Sir William Armstrong. According to this countermyth he was not an inventor at all, let alone a wizard, but a corrupt oligarch of the old school. Armstrong reigned supreme only in his piratical dominion over what was one of the defining industries of the age.

At this moment the patents controversy came to a head. In 1868 MacFie was elected to Parliament amid a general victory for Gladstone's Liberals. He was now in a position to pursue