Owning and disowning invention: intellectual property, authority and identity in British science and technology, 1880-1920.

Accustomed views on science, technology and society have recently become unsettled. As the much-publicized closure of chemistry and physics departments at UK universities has illuminated, there is no longer a presumption that basic research deserves public funding. Academic scientists meanwhile have become increasingly entrepreneurial, turning their backs on seemingly old and stable ideals of disinterested inquiry to revert to the pursuit of patents and profits. At the same time, genomics, the Internet and other recent developments in 'techno-science' have shifted the boundaries of what counts as 'intellectual property', blurring distinctions between discovery and invention, originality and imitation, secrecy and openness. Important general concerns have thus been raised about the ownership of knowledge that have major implications for the public.

In debate over these concerns, history has all too often been exploited to defend self-interested positions 'for' or 'against' restrictions on the ownership of new kinds of intellectual property. Distinctly lacking has been the kind of historical perspective that might render the past genuinely useful to inform present day concerns. This project thus looks at how issues of intellectual property originally became a major problem for science and technology at the turn of the twentieth century. Investigating how scientists were first able to shed their reliance on patents for funding, and indeed develop alternative modes of intellectual property will indicate the extent to which - ironically - our society has come full circle in encouraging techno-scientists once again to become patent-driven entrepreneurs. Going back to c.1900 for insight on these matters will hold up a mirror to the present, showing how things then were interestingly similar and yet instructively different to our current situation.

Two major themes of public importance emerge from this. First, the popular idea that invention has always been the application of ideas from 'pure science' to practical matters turns out to be a crude myth. This one-way conception of how pure science supposedly inspires invention is a very recent phenomenon, and has only been plausible since the early twentieth century. This project explains how that conception first came to be tenable during World War 1 by looking at how scientists and engineers sought government funding in order to escape the problems of being obliged to rely upon patenting for financial income. The second closely related theme is that forcing scientists and engineers to become financially reliant upon the benefits of intellectual property - as was often the case before 1914 - could seriously compromise their capacity for producing authoritative and disinterested knowledge. This historical insight is offered with a view to informing debates about the merits of compelling scientists to pursue their research in a manner that is entirely self-funding.

Finally, the project addresses present day concerns by considering three areas of techno-science to track how their early development raised problems in intellectual property. The most creative and controversial area of technology in the late nineteenth century was electrical engineering. Everyone had a stake in the development of the telephone, electric light and wireless as domestic technologies. Yet the subtly immaterial character of electricity posed major problems for defining the technical character of these innovations and thus who could claim to have 'authored' them, just as the ownership of immaterial information and software bedevils our equivalent 'boom technology' of computing. The early history of licensed plant breeding similarly foreshadows the rise of patenting life forms in biotechnology, while modern aerospace engineers share aeronautic pioneers' concern about secrecy in publicly funded research. Thisproject thus offers insights that may help to resolve today's conflicts over intellectual property.