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By Root 2149 0

to contribute to the Society's work. Only by registering inventions, observations, and discoveries at Gresham College, they said, could authorship be established and secured. And this line of persuasion worked. The Society did attract contributions from across Europe on much this basis. But as those appeals effectively acknowledged, it did not so much eliminate priority disputes as render them implosive rather than explosive. It used them to force participants into greater engagement with each other and with the experimental community. They became structured affairs that followed a prescribed course designed to keep them in train and secure knowledge as their outcome. The perusal and registration system served this purpose. It made the priority dispute into the archetypal scientific controversy

Whenever a debate arose, therefore, whatever it was at first about, the criteria for victory were now likely to end up being defined by the availability of the register, journal, and Transactions-an archive shaped by perusals and anxieties of authorship. So it was almost inevitable that when a figure like John Wallis clashed with Hooke, or Hooke with Huygens, or Newton with Leibniz, they would do so ultimately on grounds of authorship. And it was perhaps just as inevitable that once Isaac Newton took over control of the archive, he would prove unbeatable on that terrain. He took the most sophisticated author-creating device yet invented, and used it to become the greatest author in the history of science.

SEAWATER AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PATENTS

The Royal Society sought to extend this approach to inventions across the realm. It aspired to oversee the issuing of patents to inventors or introducers of mechanisms, arts, or techniques. Just as it did when venturing into the world of the printed book, however, here it found itself confronting an intractable world of pride and piracy. And it was much less successful in tackling it.

The 1624 Monopolies Act had endorsed the granting of patents for new and newly introduced arts, declaring for the first time in English law that innovation warranted protection. Yet the practice of patenting remained politically controversial, and there was no real patents system for inventors to use. The process of getting and defending a patent was long, expensive, and capricious. The Society sought to intervene in this perplexing practice. Whenever the Crown received a request for a patent, it argued, the Society should be entrusted with appraising the request. In other words, its perusal regime should be extended into the commonwealth at large to regulate innovation in commerce, manufacturing, and the arts.

This ambition arose partly from a long-standing desire to reform the practical arts. In projects like that for a "history of trades," Boyle and his counterparts had sought to persuade the artisans of London to reveal their skills, in return for which the virtuosi promised to improve and systematize them, and then to hand them to the reading public for the common good. Were the Society to become a patent authority, then its role as arbiter of skills would be extended over new as well as existing crafts. The benefits to the Society itself would be clear, and those to the commonwealth promised to be great. Yet its projects to reform the arts had always met with a rather frosty reception. Its gentlemen were not always given the cold shoulder by artisans or master craftsmen, although the belief that they were became ingrained. Robert Hooke, a mechanic himself, conversed extensively with them. But overall the Society's inquiries never came close to realizing its ambitions. To the extent that experimental philosophy engaged successfully with the mechanical arts, it was largely through ventures like Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises or John Houghton's Collection of letters for the improvement of husbandry and trade - independent initiatives that began outside the Society and reached into it, rather than vice versa.31 The situation paralleled in a sense that of Newton in Cambridge: what was deemed civility