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By Root 1987 0

a remarkable contention given that their device had, in Wiener's view, been a victim of the patents system. But it reinforced his broad claim, whichwas that what really mattered were the channels by which information could flow between two basically distinct social kinds, akin to the mechanic and liberal artists, or scholars and craftsmen, invoked in earlier centuries of debate about creative rights. He called them thinkers and makers. Before a new technique could "pass from the intellectual to the artisan," as he put it, society must provide these two quite distinct types with adequate contacts. Thus, for example, Hellenistic Greece had been a golden age of invention because Archimedes and Hero could "communicate with kings and learned men." This principle had reached its acme in the late nineteenth century in a"synthe- sis" of science and craft. The age of the "science lords" like Kelvin had seen the "pure scientist," the "craftsman," and the "industrialist" combine into one.

But then had come disintegration. Research had become a corporate enterprise. Edison had created the industrial laboratory, in which teams of workers approached invention as a business. Following his lead, AT&T had built its own massive machinery to churn out patents. Business needed science as never before in this age of communications, and the Bell System encapsulated their convergence. It had cultivated a new kind of "adventurer-scientist" who, in Wiener's eyes, betrayed science in pursuit of power and profit. "Megabuck science" was his contemptuous name for the whole enterprise. Laboratories -whether Soviet orAmerican, private or public-came to resemble the enormous machines that it required. Like Polanyi, Wiener dismissed these institutions as good at rote work but unsuited to radical discovery. To them, every problem was a task to be tackled by a team, and teams were tools of mutual concealment. Secrecy and fear thus pervaded modern scientific life-fear of subordinates, competitors, and rival nations.45

The reason why megabuck research killed science, therefore, was that it mistook the nature of information. Information was properly more process than substance. It existed as a flow through a network, not an accumulation in a reservoir of some kind. The fallacy of large-scale laboratory science was its ambition to hoard knowledge in one place (the team, or the lab itself). The patent system was the counterpart of this in legal terms. That was why Wiener's career culminated in an attack on the patents system. Intellectual property, he proclaimed, impeded the flow of information in the great network that was society. Worse than interference, it was a kind of deliberate "jamming."46 It had to go. Whatever policy might replace it, he believed, must make the recognition of authors conditional on open publication. It must be a policy of counterjamming. The verdict with which Invention culminated was explicit. "The truth can make us free," Wiener concluded, "only when it is a freely obtainable truth."47

Wiener's history of invention singled out AT&T for attack. Its longdistance network, Wiener implied, was the material extrusion of a patent pool, snaking out to entwine America.48 The creation of that network had marked the conjunction of patenting and capitalism to concoct the adventurer-scientist, the model for whom had been Columbia engineer Michael Pupin, patentee of the network's crucial component. Wiener discarded Invention because he wanted to focus all the more on Pupin's story He had decided to write, of all things, a novel about patenting. Entitled The Tempter, it would explain the rise of AT&T and the fall of science in terms of a fatal Faustian bargain. He told his publisher that it would be "a treatment in fictional form of my ideas on invention in the modern world."

Wiener's tale turned on the electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside (i85o- I925). Heaviside's story had long fascinated him-longer, in fact, than any other single topic, cybernetic or otherwise. Wiener's own earliest work at MIT had been an attempt to reformulate his work for