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By Root 2014 0

Both patents and "know-how," as the participants called it, would need to be pooled somehow for any single entity to be feasible. How this might be done proved an almost insurmountable problem, on which the whole proposal for a single company nearly foundered. Isaacs wanted to insist that Marconi alone, as the dominant patentee, build the transmitters. It alone could furnish "uniform" standards, he declared. But the others denied this "absolutely," retorting that their own patents might be fewer but were just as necessary. They wanted the future company to pick and choose apparatus on grounds of quality, "regardless of the patent situation." McKinstry in particular complained that Isaacs would make Marconi a monopolist. Metrovick, he said, refused to proceed "on the basis of operating by leave of somebody else." Isaacs responded by challenging the others to place their own designs on the table, saying that anything in them that seemed preferable would be incorporated by Marconi in its apparatus. Scarcely an inviting suggestion, it found no takers, and the allimportant unity disintegrated.'0

Some way must therefore be found, as Gill put it, to proceed "unhindered by patents." It was a measure of the seriousness of the crisis that Gill himself proposed simply abandoning them altogether. McKinstry agreed, saying that a "composite station" could then be built with "the best of everybody's patents." He even recommended that the manufacturers indemnify the future company against patent-infringement suits. But Isaacs would have none of it. He dug in his heels and insisted that unless all stations were built by Marconi it would scupper the whole plan. "We are not going to give you the opportunity of learning what we have learnt," he insisted. McKinstry, exasperated, repeated his charge of monopolism. If Marconi was set on vetoing the scheme if it did not built all the stations, then he would veto it if Marconi did.

McKinstry now proposed a desperate course. He suggested scrapping the entire one-company scheme and instead creating two rival bodies, centering on what had emerged as the two patent pools. The first would be the British Broadcasting Company; the second, a new entity provisionally called the Radio Broadcasting Company. Manufacturers would join one or other company as they preferred, and each of the eight proposed transmitting stations would then be allocated to either the BBC or RBC. A third corporation would divide up license revenues between the two." It was a workable if ungainly idea, and the postmaster general grudgingly agreed to support it as a last resort. But Isaacs still vowed that he would prevent the second company fromusing Marconi's patents. It now seemed that any proposal would fall afoul of his intellectual property absolutism, and that broadcasting itself might be stillborn. In despair, the group reported that not only could they not agree, but they could not even arrive at a wording to describe their disarray.

With the crisis at hand, McKinstry and Isaacs met privately over several days and hammered out a compromise. Nobody knows the course of their arguments - they must have been intense -but byJuly i 9 they were back to talking in terms of one companyi" Perhaps Isaacs saw that unless Marconi compromised, it risked losing its patent rights anyway by state intervention. Precisely that had recently happened in the United States at the end of World War I, when the company had seen its patents allocated to U.S. companies, especially RCA. At any rate, Marconi relinquished its demand to build all the stations. It would construct six, but the other two were to be allocated by the board of the new company, and Marconi agreed not to restrict their use of its patents. Gill had been right: onlywhen intellectual property was abandoned could the roadblock be passed. The way in which it was set aside, however, would have lasting consequences.

Finally a viable scheme was in the offing. The new company was to be a conglomerate, open to all "genuine British manufacturers employing British labour." They could buy