INAUGURAL LECTURE: Owning and disowning invention Problems of knowledge, integrity and technology Professor Graeme J.N. Gooday, Centre for History & Philosophy of Science, Department of Philosophy
Mar 29, 2015
INAUGURAL LECTURE:
Owning and disowning invention
Problems of knowledge, integrity and technology
Professor Graeme J.N. Gooday,
Centre for History & Philosophy of Science,
Department of Philosophy
Owning and Disowning Invention: Intellectual Property, Authority and
Identity in British Science and Technology, 1880-1920
AHRC funded collaborative research project 2007-10
Project team:
Graeme Gooday & Stathis Arapostathis (Leeds)
- history of electrical technology
Greg Radick & Berris Charnley (Leeds)
- history of plant breeding
Christine MacLeod & Jon Hopwood-Lewis
(Bristol) – history of aeronautics
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
Mirror galvanometer
Silvanus Phillips Thompson
Valve telephone c.1885.
Oliver Heaviside
Heaviside’s elegant reformulation of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetic propagation.
Oliver Lodge
Lodge’s 1897 syntonic wireless system
Bell’s First US patent 174,465, “Improvement in telegraphy”, 1876
?US Patent 240, 566 1930
Refrigerator with no moving parts and requiring no supply of electricity
US Patent 240, 566 1930
Refrigerator with no moving parts and requiring no supply of electricity
Henry Newman I consider, then, that I am chargeable with no paradox, when I speak of a Knowledge which is its own end, when I call it liberal knowledge, or a gentleman's knowledge, when I educate for it, and make it the scope of a University.
‘Knowledge its Own End’ The Idea of a University (1858)
Statute of Monopolies of 1624
Section 6 declared unlawful all monopolies except…
“…that any declaration beforementioned shall not extend to any letters patents and grants of privilege for the term of fourteen years or under, hereafter to be made, of the sole working or making of any manner of new manufactures within this realm, to the true and first inventor and inventors of such manufactures’
Sir Clifford Allbutt’s clinical thermometer
Oliver & Mary Lodge & their 12 children
Famous Inventors in telecommunications?
The telephone –
The filament light bulb –
The radio –
Lewis Howard Latimer among the G.E. Experts team
Some inventors of ‘the telephone’ before Bell…
Antonio Meucci (1874)Phillipp Reis (1861) Elisha Gray (1876)
The tribulations of patents in
early telecommunications
Four short case studies
a) Thomson: Patentability & secrecy
Philadelphia Exhibition 1876: Bell demonstrates articulating telephone (US patent March 7th) – Thomson witnesses
S.P.Thompson’s ‘New Telephone Company’
Times, Dec 21 1886
b) Thompson - The Master Patent
The Bell Edison
United Telephone Company versus
c) Heaviside - ‘Philanthropic’ publication
Heaviside’s condition of distortionless transmission
Pupin’s patented loading coil
Lodge’s syntony vs Marconi monopolism
CONCLUSIONS
Some lessons from the troubled
past of academic patenting