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By Root 2106 0

In particular, Lord Mansfield-who upheld perpetuity in Millar v. Taylor and then doomed it by his silence-presided over the case that established the propriety of patenting changes to machines. His side of the literary property conflict had just been arguing that progress in mechanics was the root of social progress; and this notion he now embedded into patent practice. Mansfield also insisted that the contemporary notion of copying be made the criterion for a patent's specification: a skilled craftsman in an appropriate field must be able to replicate the device from the document.74This then became central to the concept that emerged in these years of a patent as a public bargain, with a specification of this kind as the quid pro quo for a temporary monopoly. It also confirmed that "principles" could not be patented. On the authority ofYates's pro-Donaldson view in Millar v. Taylor, a principle was now deemed akin to "the sentiments of an author while in his own mind"-pure doctrines, perhaps, unable to be reduced to property until rendered in some published form. Notions of copying, progress, and the public interest thus solidified in the domain of mechanism-of industry-in alignment with the emerging culture of authorship.75

It is therefore fitting that one of the few extended responses to the 1774 outcome should come from a Grub Street hack who was also a projector of automata, and that it should address at length the relation between authorship and invention. Aleading English translator of Rousseau and Voltaire, William Kenrick made his living as a playwright, a literary pugilist prepared to take on all comers (including Garrick, Dr. Johnson, and even, faute de mieux, himself), and editor of a rather serious critical periodical called the London Review. He seems to have been a materialist, a mortalist (that is, a believer that the soul expires at death), and an announced foe to priestcraft; the pages of the London Review resounded with his defenses of Joseph Priestley's unorthodoxies. He was also the projector of a perpetual motion machine that enjoyed considerable notoriety.

A Saxon artisan named Johann Bessler, or rather (thanks to a simple encoding algorithm) Orffyreus, had originally invented Kenrick's device in the 1710s- It took the form of a large wheel that seemed to turn unceasingly with no visible power source. The renowned experimental philosopher Willem'sGravesande had examined Orffyreus's wheel in the Landgrave's court at Kassel and favorably compared it to the latest steam engines, with which it was in competition as a power source for industry. A long debate had then ensued involving Europe's greatest philosophers, as the question of whether such a device were physically possible grew into a no-holds-barred controversy between Newtonian mechanics, which seemed to outlaw it, and Leibnizian vis viva theories, which'sGravesande thought might leave open the possibility. Meanwhile, Orffyreus sought to sell his secret for a huge sum, but found no takers and died in obscurity. Finding himself a decade and a half later in the same castle, Kenrick was inspired to recreate the wheel. After spending another fifteen years on what he called his "rotator," he applied for a patent, only to waver between seeking exclusivity and adapting Orffyreus's old strategy of trying to sell the secret. In the end he announced a new system of mechanics that apparently lay behind the machine, and advertised in print for subscribers willing to pay to be in on the mystery76

Kenrick found that the worlds ofprint andprojectingwere inseparable, with the same materialism upholding both. Ideas, the source of knowledge, were explicable in mechanical terms, and as such were in principle available to all. Like Priestley, Kenrick believed in a rational, active public that could be united through the circulation of printed knowledge. A perpetual rotator could be validated by the perpetual circulation of print. But threats of priestcraft and combination loomed over each of these convictions. Even clear, "sensible Demonstration," for example,