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, AHRC funded collaborative research project

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 Heavisides elegant reformulation of Maxwells equations of electromagnetic propagation.

Oliver Lodge Lodges 1897 syntonic wireless system

Bells First US patent 174,465, Improvement in telegraphy, 1876

? US Patent 240, Refrigerator with no moving parts and requiring no supply of electricity

US Patent 240, 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 Allbutts 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.Thompsons New Telephone Company Times, Dec b) Thompson - The Master Patent The Bell Edison United Telephone Company versus

c) Heaviside - Philanthropic publication Heavisides condition of distortionless transmission Pupins patented loading coil

Lodges syntony vs Marconi monopolism

CONCLUSIONS Some lessons from the troubled past of academic patenting