I
raised this query in my bog post dated 19th February 2018 and VK
Varun, Scientist from DSIR, Ministry of Science & Technology commented
During First Industrial Resolution, As per
USPTO, 4695 patents were granted during 01/Jan/1790 to 31/12/1840 and its
distribution is as follows:
1790-1800 [117]; 1801-1810 [084]; 1811-1820
[177]; 1821-1830 [595]; and 1831-1840 [3722].
Thank u
Varun. There were indeed many patents and this was discussed in the working
paper: Patents and the first industrial revolution in
Some interesting aspects:
Between
1660-1760, few patents were awarded in England; it was unusual for more than a
dozen to be granted in any one year. number
of patents increases rapidly so that in 1800, 96 patents were awarded and in
1850, 513. Out
of 72 'superstar' inventors born between 1660 and 1830, 81% obtained at least
one patent in the course of their careers.
Patent
agents appeared in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Agents offered an extremely valuable service; by 1849, virtually all inventors
employed an agent (even if they resided in the capital).
International
patents: In
the 1820s, Britons obtained, at the very least, 170 patents in France (6.3 %)
of the total awarded) and in the 1830s, 415 (7%) of the total awarded. Henry
Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for ordnance
production from 1850 to 1855 when he patented his method. He sold an exclusive
licence to the Spanish for his steel
converter for £5,000.
Patent
infringement: Work
on patent cases in the Court of Chancery between 1714 and 1758, shows that
there were, at the very least, forty one cases instigated by patentees. The
Court of Chancery offered patentees a variety of legal remedies – most
importantly, injunctions.
Patent
licensing : Between
1770 and 1845, around 30 percent of
English patents were assigned in full and another 25 percent were
either assigned in part and/or licensed as well. Many
inventors licensed their patent. By
selling a portion of the patent as part of a partnership agreement, inventors
could obtain access to manufacturing plant and/or capital. Without sufficient
capital, it is difficult to turn an invention to profit.
Many
inventors made money : silk-winding machinery patented by Thomas
Lombe in
1718 and worked in partnership with his half-brother John and his cousin
William. Over the course of the patent term (1718-1732, Thomas made £80,000, and when he died in
1739, he was able to leave his family £120,000, a colossal fortune by the
standards of the day.
All
inventors did not make money : there were many inventors during the
industrial revolution who failed to reap any rewards from their endeavours and
ended their days in poverty – John Kay, James Hargreaves and Richard Trevithick
to name but three. Moreover, Kay, Hargreaves and Trevithick all chose to patent
their most important inventions (respectively, the flying shuttle, the spinning
jenny and the first high-pressure steam locomotive), but to no avail.
Patenting is not a new subject, only we cannot continue to ignore them for 4th industrial revolution too. in Part 3 we will discuss about pitfalls of leap-frogging.
