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By Root 2027 0

even made use of farmers' barbed-wire fences to carry calls. They had seen themselves as mounting an "uprising of the people" against Boston Brahmins and big-city Bosses, and as embodying "the spirit of American independence." But an attempt to unify the independents into a rival system failed in 1902, and Wall Street promptly abandoned them. AT&T had then agreed to end its designation of them as pirates. Instead it moved to monopolize the long-distance market, buying up patents and filing its own so as to keep this province to itself. Two critically important examples were the loading coil and the audion. AT&T bought Columbia engineer Michael Pupin's patent to the coil in 1900 and, thanks to successive minor improvements, held it inviolate until 1935. During that time not a single license was issued for the device, which was essential to any long-distance operation. De Forest's audion (a triode amplifying valve) played a similarly central role in radio communication, which meant that AT&T became a pivotal player in the "radio trust" too. So dominant was the company's patent position that from 1908 to the outbreak of World War II it did not need to launch a single lawsuit against a pirate.

The Bell System therefore represented in its purest form a "philosophy" of "the place of science in industry."The lynchpin of this philosophy was the eponymous Bell Labs. The origins of this institution lay in existing laboratories within the system, all of them created to secure patents. Research at those labs had aimed at piecemeal improvements, not radical inventions -the chief engineer had once reassured the company's president that "no one is employed who, as an inventor, is capable of originating new apparatus." But once the independents were out of the way the company poured money into more systematic and radical research. It spent about $250 million on science between 1916 and i935-an amount larger than the total operating budget of Harvard University-in pursuit of all kinds of projects. It represented itself as devoted to open-ended investigation. But in practice only the most prominent scientists enjoyed such freedom. The major aim remained to "occupy the field" by patents.'°

The FCC's interpretation of all this was deeply unsympathetic. It concluded that the Bell System was a monopoly based on an "extensive and unremitting" pursuit of patents. The trust lavishly underwrote a version of science to bolster this pursuit, the Commission argued, and it identified that version with science tout court. But its science created tools of restriction. Moreover, those patents covered minor improvements rather than real inventions, and many were in fields only marginally related to wired telephony. And although relatively few of its patents were nowadays bought from outsiders, those few included the ones on which the entire system rested. Since 1876, in fact, by hook or by crook the company had managed to secure the rights to every development in telephony, with the short-lived exception of automatic exchanges. Rumor had long assigned it an "underground railroad" to the Patent Office allowing it to appropriate others' ideas for itself. The FCC claimed that about two-thirds of AT&T's approximately nine thousand patents were dormant, and useful only for "suppression." AT&T staunchly denied this, of course, saying that the true figure was closer to 5o percent, and pointing out that the need for standardization meant that many patents would inevitably end up unused. The impression remained, however, that patenting as a tool of suppression, once a theory of the Victorian campaigners, had become a massive reality. According to Roosevelt's FCC, patent monopolies really were blocking progress, suppressing inventions, and oppressing the public. The Commission believed that the history of telephony and radio demonstrated the sheer range of abuses to which patents were prone. Intellectual property appropriations and piracy accusations had distorted an entire modern economy. In AT&T's world, it concluded, "research, inventions, and patents appear