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By Root 2192 0

with a written description of its use in the register. The sealed deposit was retained, and opened and published only after his death. The registration system thus worked. In fact, Hales believed that this newly achieved secrecy had doomed Walcot's invention. But it perhaps worked too well, because Hales also thought it had imperiled Fitzgerald's. It had denied both of them a way of demonstrating that their waters were free of spirit of salt.42 Certainly, the assaying of substances-the determination of their identity, composition, and medical effects -was a problem for all parties (and a major concern more generally in a context of adulteration, as chapter 5 will show). Although both Fitzgerald and Walcot demonstrated their machines before powerful audiences, including the king, they needed some way to certify the water they produced to those audiences. It was because this problem of authentication loomed so large that Boyle's secret suddenly became so valuable. At any rate, it was evidently possible for something to become a secret long after being published, and without a state restriction being imposed, by being inserted into a secret-registering system like that of the virtuosi.

Meanwhile, Fitzgerald adopted a third tack. Like Walcot, he made cryptic references to "Cements" that had to be used in his machine. What these cements actually were is again unclear-Hates suspected they performed no function at all. But they certainly existed, for Sloane saw them and described them as resembling common brick clay.43 As a nonmember of the Royal Society, however, Fitzgerald had no recourse to its system of registration. He could not do as Boyle had done. Instead, he put the recipes for his cements in a silver box, added a testimonial handwritten by Boyle, closed it with the king's seal, and lodged the secret with the lord mayor of London. It proved a poor choice, in the absence of a regular protocol like the Society's. Or perhaps it was an all too effective one. For the box vanished altogether. Nobody has seen it since.

These three approaches, alike in somewaysyet distinct in their designs and very different in their outcomes, show how mutable the criteria for victory could be in debates about technical authorship. Finding himself stymied, Walcot went abroad. He approached the other great commercial power of the day, and England's major nautical rival: the Netherlands. Here he found more success. Competitive demonstrations of his and Fitzgerald's machines took place before the Dutch authorities, and Walcot's emerged the winner. He persuaded the Dutch that he was "the True Inventor," and that Fitzgerald could do no more than "any Ordinary Distiller." Walcot consequently obtained patents from the States General, the State of Zeeland, and the State of Holland- the last of which, interestingly, explicitly cautioned against "the allowing of Two Grants for one and the same Invention," saying that it would be "a thing contrary to the General Custom of Nations, and would hinder the Practice ofArt."44 Armed with these rights, Walcot felt secure enough to return to England in the wake of the Dutch invasion in 1688. He hoped that a transformed political scene would benefit him, all the more so after Boyle died in 169i. At length Walcot did manage to get a private bill passed through Parliament. In 1695 he finally regained an exclusive right to the art for another thirty-one years.45

It did him little good. His machine never seems to have worked very well, and in all probability-it is hard to be certain-no East Indiaman ever carried one in earnest. Projectors continued to propose devices to make seawater drinkable well into the eighteenth century, gaining nothing more than a reputation akin to that of the longitude men for their pains. Still, we should not let hindsight blind us to the point that any one of these machines might have proved viable. There was no reason at the time to doubt the possibility, especially with the greatest experimental philosopher of the age supporting one of them. The balance of plausibility was with the patentees.