Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [44]
The motives underpinning such questions were obvious. In an age when military, mercantile, and political power increasingly depended on mastery of the oceans, the problem of provisioning long-distance voyages was scarcely less pressing than that of navigating them. An East Indiaman had to carry a heavy cargo of water just to keep its crew alive. This drastically reduced the amount of cargo, passengers, or weaponry that the vessel could carry. And freshwater tended not to stay fresh for long, so vessels had to put in to shore fairly frequently, which created its own geopolitical demands. Needless to say, a method of desalinating seawater, could it be attained, would eliminate these problems at a stroke. It would give a maritime nation unprecedented ability to project military and commercial power over long distances. "Solving" seawater was potentially as important as solving longitude.
Attempts to tackle the seawater problem dated back at least to the beginning of the century. The ingenious Cornelius Drebbel had advanced one such device in Jacobean times, and his daughter, Catharina Kuffler, tried to interest Boyle and the Royal Society in it in 1663. They seem not to have been receptive, although Balthasar de Monconys reported that the Duke of York (the future James II, who commanded the Restoration navy) had bought Drebbel's secret.35 Within the Society itself, conversations continued on and off for years on the subject, and Boyle published his own tract on the saltiness of the sea. As a member of the Court of Committees for the East India Companythe managing body of that hugely important corporation-and a participant in the government's Council for Foreign Plantations, Boyle had a personal stake in any technique that could be got to work. He adduced much testimony from sailors to argue that seawater's brackish quality derived from conventional salt, which meant, he reckoned, that it should be possible to make potable water by distilling brine. Boyle proceeded to try experiments, to little obvious effect.36
Shortly after Boyle's work on seawater appeared, however, one William Walcot obtained a patent on just such a technique. Walcot was in a sense the Richard Atkyns of the chemical world. He was another ex cavalier down on his luck and scouting around for a way to make a fortune by staking an audacious and opportunistic claim to a potentially invaluable craft. He had been a page to Charles I, or so he claimed, and had reputedly accompanied the unhappy king on the scaffold, whichwas a handy if implausible legend to propagate. He had subsequently trained in the law, before suddenly emerging to claim his patent on what he called a desalination machine. The exact nature and origin of this machine are as obscure as Walcot himself; it was not yet necessary to file a detailed description of an invention to get a patent on it, and Walcot probably did not do so. In fact, there seems to be no surviving record of the patent itself, although no one then expressed any doubt that it existed. (At the time, many legal and archival documents enjoyed this kind of existence-by-consensus.) All that can be said with confidence is that his invention was some kind of device for purifying "corrupted" water, probably by distillation. Walcot sought an act of Parliament too to buttress his claim, and boasted the public endorsement of the royal shipbuilder at Deptford. Everything seemed set for him to begin producing his machine in quantity and reap a windfall.
Yet years passed, and nothing substantial came from Walcot. After his initial fanfare he lapsed into obscurity. In 1683, he found himself cast rudely aside. One Robert Fitzgerald had pointed out to Whitehall that Walcot had done nothing to exploit his monopoly, and demanded to supplant him. Fitzgerald was a nephew of none other than Robert Boyle. He had a rival process,