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By Root 2026 0

he claimed, which he heavilyhinted had been invented by Boyle himself. Fitzgerald's machine apparently cost £18, was less than two feet across, and could produce ninety gallons of water per day, safely and without the oversight of a skilled chymist. Both the treasurer of the Navy and the leading members of the College of Physicians backed it, as did Boyle. Boyle actually conducted demonstrations of the device before the king, using tests he had proposed in his earlier book to show the purity of the water it produced. Walcot tried to protest, but he was completely outgunned. His patent was abruptly abrogated. As compensation the Privy Council granted him only a one-sixth share of Fitzgerald's profits. At once Fitzgerald and his partners published pamphlets announcing their own patented "invention" and appealing for ships' masters to come to a coffeehouse in Birchin Lane to discuss terms for using it.37 These tracts reappeared in several forms and various languages. Notices also ran in the official London Gazette.

But Walcot did not give up. He now began a slow-boiling feud with Fitzgerald that lasted for at least another two decades. It displayed many of the traits that were characteristic of such disputes at the time, when patents could be awarded for other criteria than priority. Walcot thus continued to insist not just that he was "the first and trice Inventor" of the technique, but, more saliently, that he was the only person with the skill actually to make such a machine work. He portrayed Fitzgerald and his camp not merely as latecomers, but as corrupt. He charged that they had no real device at all, but were deploying their patronage connections - by which he meant Boyle-to obtain a patent solely in hopes of extorting Walcot's own secret from him. Their real aim, he complained, was to force him "to make a Discovery to them of the Secrets of his Art"-or, failing that, to "Entice his Workmen or Servants from his, to their Service." And others were following suit, seeing their opportunity to set up as "Pretenders" to the invention. Every time such a projector failed for want of skill, Walcot complained, his own credit was further damaged. All the while, a potentially vital invention lay idle.38 In each article, this complaint was typical of patentees' charges at the time.

Walcot, Fitzgerald, and Boyle all tried to create and retain "secrets" in the ensuing contest. As they did so, they mapped out the range of strategies that could be adopted to try to enclose technical knowledge in this period, exactly as the Royal Societywas seeking to extend its own authority into such matters. Walcot, first, started out by claiming that a special ingredient was added to the water in his device to remove a bad taste that otherwise remained after distillation. As the early eighteenth-century chemist Stephen Hales, who got his information from Hans Sloane, put it, "he kept it a great secret," but Hales heard that it was "some Preparation of Antimony by Fire." Yet Walcot eventually reversed course. In the later stages of the struggle his camp even claimed that a principal virtue of his approach was that it did not use such a substance, the lack of proprietary ingredients being a virtue in terms of public utility.39 Walcot's chymical secret thus melted away as part of a claim about public utility as a requirement for patentability.

By sharp contrast, what Boyle tried to protect only became a secret in this struggle. It had previously been openly avowed, and indeed published in print. Much earlier, Boyle had developed a technique for using a solution of silver in aqua fortis (in modern terms, silver nitrate solution) to detect trace amounts of dissolved salt in water. He had published this technique as long before as 1663.40 But now he suddenly came to account it "a great Secret"-a phrase that seems to have borne some of the connotations that it had in those steady sellers of the book trade, books of secrets.41 Boyle discoursed of what he now called his "arcamim" at the Royal Society, and deposited a sample of it to be kept sealed along