Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [43]
The Society's bids to become a patent referee proved similarly ill starred. These bids, although theywere launched repeatedly, do not seem to have been pursued with much determination. Nor is it easy to know how seriously they were entertained in Whitehall-although it seems likely that in the early days at least theywere regarded as workable. Charles II himself reportedly affirmed that "no patent should pass for any philosophical or mechanical invention, but what was first put to the examination of the society," and there were certainly cases in which the court did forward applications to the virtuosi. As late as 1713 John Arbuthnot heard that Queen Anne had declared a policy to this effect.3' But like the practitioners of established crafts, the projectors of new ones may have seen little to gain in revealing their "secrets" to a group of gentlemen who offered in return to secure their authorship. Some even seem to have feared that the Society would make itself the proprietor of registered contributions - an impression that did have some support from pronouncements by fellows, including Wallis and Hooke.33 At one point a proposal was floated in the Society to abandon its vaunted openness in order to reassure such skeptics. But the problem was never really surmounted. The Society's ambition to become an arbiter of authorship in arts and manufactures came to nothing. In part that may have been because its protocols against piracy looked, to craftsmen, like piracy itself.
Nevertheless, the Society did engage at length with patents on a number of specific technologies. When it did so, however, it always found itself in the position, not of an authoritative arbiter, but of one party among many, some of which had access to powerful allies such as the king. One well-known instance is the ferocious dispute over spring watches between Hooke and Oldenburg in the mid-1670s. 34 What made this clash so cataclysmic, perhaps, was precisely that it was a patent dispute, and as such could not be confined within the Society's conventions; Hooke himself appealed to Charles II for support. In general, while the Society was quite successful at dealing with authorship clashes within its community, it found itself on much riskier ground when it was forced to move beyond that community to arenas where different ideals held good. In the courts, at Whitehall, in craft and mercantile companies, and in overseas venues it was often competing with rival claimants to authority, expertise, and even disinterest. And it was doing so on their terrain.
The best exemplar of this predicament was a contest that began, prosaically enough, with perhaps the commonest substance on the planet: seawater. This contest was grounded in the delicate but momentous intricacies of matter theory. But as it proceeded, it brought the Royal Society up against many of the issues and tensions roiling mid-seventeenth-century England, and that we have encountered already: the clash of royal power with commercial custom, the emerging political economy of colonialism, the relative authority of gentility and expertise, and the proper conduct of inventors and scholars in a royal state. And looming over all was the competition for naval supremacy with Britain's great rival as a trading nation, the Netherlands.
Many of the most pressing problems of the age -philosophical as well as political and military-concerned the sea. The problem of the longitude is only the best known of them: anyone who furnished a reliable and portable technique for determining the longitude of a ship far removed from its home port would become rich, and would vastly enhance the power of the nation that possessed the secret. Aspirants to "solve the longitude" included not only men like Edmond Halley but any number of otherwise obscure "projectors." By the early eighteenth century they had become a running joke. But as well as the longitude, the sea presented other issues demanding explanation, including the phenomena