THE VALUE OF PATENT DATA
3.1 The collation of patent data
By the middle of the nineteenth century the acceleration in the number of patented inventions was such that when the first head of England's Patent Office, Bennet Woodcroft, prepared an index of the patents filed in each of the three offices of Chancery, the number of patents granted between 1617 and 1852 totalled some 14,354.3 Woodcroft is important to this thesis because his work provides a comprehensive record of patented inventions and highlights the rapid increase in patents granted after 1760, the period when railway technology was developing. The number of patents registered per annum, as collated by Woodcroft, is tabulated in Appendix A, and represented in Figure 1. According to Woodcroft’s chronological collation, the number of patents registered in the 1760s numbered over 200, nearly 500 in the 1780s and continued to double every two decades to the mid-nineteenth century.
Figure 1: Patents granted per annum, 1750-1852.(see Appendix A).
Source: Woodcroft, Patents of Invention Chronologically Arranged (1854), 122-1518.
It is argued here that a detailed examination of the acceleration in patented inventive activity within the early railway sector leads to a greater understanding of the relationship between the patent system and
3 Bennet Woodcroft, Titles of Patents of Invention Chronologically Arranged, 1617-1852 (London: Eyre and
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early railway technology. Furthermore, any consideration of patented railway-related inventive activity prior to 1852 must involve examination of Woodcroft’s collation which establishes that patent numbers increased substantially in the early nineteenth century, and that the number of railway-related patents was significant. Woodcroft published a chronological index of patents in 1854 and the following year inaugurated the Reference Index, a guide to the particular Chancery office of enrolment of a patent, and the journals where abstracts of specifications could be found.4 The indices were published in blue covered folders, known as the blue books, it being the practice of the day for Government publications to appear in blue. From 1854 to the present day, researchers have been assisted by Woodcroft’s herculean task.5
As will be discussed in subsequent sections of this chapter, patent numbers per se do not necessarily assist with meaningful assessment of the impact of the patent system on advancing railway technology, and there is need for wider, detailed analysis. Nevertheless, the high number of railway-related patents, as collated by Woodcroft, does suggest a willingness on the part of pioneering railway inventors to turn to the patent system. In advancing the argument that Woodcroft’s undertaking provides significant information on the enterprise of inventors, and to assess the value of his efforts, it is pertinent to provide brief details of his background. He was the first technical expert in the newly established Patent Office: engineer, patentee, patent agent, university professor, librarian, museum collector and historian of technology. Woodcroft is often referred to as the 'father' of the Patent Office, if not the only parent.6 In 1853, writing in the preface of one of his subject surveys, Woodcroft made exaggerated reference to the records of invention as 'the accumulated knowledge of mankind.'7 Hewish offers a more nuanced approach suggesting that Woodcroft was aware of the value of patent data, that they provide immediate evidence of priority (the establishment of novelty) in the legal process, as well as stimulus to further inventive activity.8
In 1847, Woodcroft was appointed to a Chair of Machinery at University College, London, and in 1857 was successfully proposed as a Fellow of the Royal Society, when Isambard Kingdom Brunel was one of his supporters for nomination.9 In 1852, with the passing of the Patent Law Amendment Act, Woodcroft was appointed Superintendent of Specifications in the new Patent Office, and set about the collation and publication of patents granted since 1617. In the peak year of 1856, over three million
4 Bennet Woodcroft, Titles of Patents of Invention Chronologically Arranged, 1617-1852. (London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1854).
5 John Hewish, The Indefatigable Mr Woodcroft. The legacy of invention (London: The British Library, 1979),
23.
6 Hewish, The Indefatigable Mr Woodcroft, 7.
7 Bennet Woodcroft, Appendix to the Specification of English Patents for Reaping Machines (London: Queens
Printers, 1853) ix.
8 Hewish, The Indefatigable Mr Woodcroft, 7-8.
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words and 1,500 drawings were copied from the Rolls in preparation for their printing.10 He published a series of pamphlets descriptive of early patented inventions including the Marquis of Worcester's account of his steam engine.11 These formed part of the Patent Office Library, opened in 1852, which by 1860 was reputedly the greatest technical library in the country, and probably in Europe,12 and was later incorporated into the British Library. A further Woodcroft innovation was the publication of the
Commissioners of Patents Journal which first appeared in 1854 and is still being published today,
containing news of applications, as well as English and foreign patent information. In 1857, Woodcroft was responsible for the opening of the Patent Office Museum in South Kensington, London (the future Victoria and Albert Museum). He gathered portraits of inventors (inspired by collections in the USA) and rescued the Symington marine steam engine 'the parent engine of steam navigation' used in the first trial in 1788 by Patrick Miller of Dalswinton in Dumfriesshire.13 Woodcroft was responsible for securing and preserving the world’s oldest steam engine, Puffing Billy (1814), and Stephenson’s Rocket (1829).14 Woodcroft’s importance lies in his substantial and sustained contribution to the history of technology. Without his efforts, it is doubtful whether some of the most important artefacts of the Industrial Revolution would have been preserved. His work provided the cornerstone of patent and library institutions which survive today.
Woodcroft is widely recognised to have been a remarkable man,15 and it is perhaps the creation of his
Reference Indices for which he will be most remembered. MacLeod and others agree that his work and
the ensuing blue books, copies of which can be found in numerous libraries worldwide, must be the starting point for all subsequent statistical research in relation to patents.16 However, the evidence does not support MacLeod’s observation that Woodcroft's perspective on invention was entirely biographical, that he sought merely to preserve historical records, physical objects and the memory of the individuals responsible for them.17 The significance of Woodcroft’s undertaking in producing accessible, published patent information cannot be overstated. In relation to the arguments advanced in this thesis, his work
10 John Hewish, Rooms near Chancery Lane. The Patent office under the Commissioners, 1852-1883 (The
British Library, 2000), 37-41.
11 Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention. Technology, Liberalism and British Identity 1750-1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 253.
12 Hewish, Rooms near Chancery Lane, 44, 147-159. Hewish, The Indefatigable, p.7. 13 Hewish, The Indefatigable Mr Woodcroft, 32.
14 Prosser, "Bennet Woodcroft”, 118-119. Woodcroft was particularly keen to construct a replica of the contents
of James Watt's Heathfield workshop but his Treasury masters would not support the endeavour to build a room which he wished to be the very 'counterfeit presentment' of the 'classic garret'. Editorial comment, The Engineer, June 8, 1877, 397-8, 398
15 Brian Spear, "Bennet Woodcroft - Patent information pioneer," World Patent Information 34, (2012):159-162.
http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/bennet-woodcroft-patent-information-pioneer-BXC7pWi8mW [accessed July 30, 2013]
16 MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution, 2. 17 MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 253.
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is highly significant. As observed by Hewitt, Woodcroft put the bibliography of invention on a sound basis in daily practice.18
In 1868, Woodcroft published a volume devoted entirely to railway-related patents, Abridgements of
Specifications relating to Railways.19 Patents are listed in chronological order and for the period 1770 to 1852, some 239 patents are recorded (See Appendix B and Figure 2). This figure is surprisingly low and warrants consideration in two important respects.
Figure 2: Patents relating to railways, ranked chronologically.
Source: Woodcroft, Abridgements relating to Railways, 1-136.
Firstly, in the preface to the 1868 collation, Woodcroft observes,
The number of Specifications at this time printed and published amounts to nearly 61,000. A large proportion of the Specifications enrolled under the old law, previous to 1852, embrace several distinct Inventions, … it cannot be doubted that several properly belonging to the group which forms the subject of this volume [railway-related] have been overlooked.20
The significance of Woodcroft’s caveat for the arguments presented in this thesis cannot be overstated. Prior to 1852 it was the practice for a patent to cover multiple inventions. For example, John Gray’s patent of 1838, for valve gear, the so-called 'horseleg' motion, the first manifestation of an expansion
18 Hewish, The Indefatigable Mr Woodcroft, 7-8.
19 Bennet Woodcroft, Patents for Inventions. Abridgements of Specifications relating to Railways,1770-1863
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1868).
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gear for locomotives, included 4 inventions.21 Similarly, the Adams Richardson patent of 1847 for a ‘fish plate’ securing one rail to the next, encompassed no fewer than thirty railway-related inventions.22 Secondly, scrutiny reveals that Woodcroft’s categorisation ‘relating to railways’ is not a collation of railway-related patents as understood in this thesis. For example, it does not include any inventions relating to steam locomotives. For these two reasons, namely multiple inventions included within a single patent and the nature of Woodcroft’s classification, the total number of railway-related patents is likely to have been considerably understated.
A different assessment of total patent numbers in the field of early railway technology can be made by examining Woodcroft’s Subject-matter Index (1854).23 The assessment is unavoidably crude, but totalling up the relevant patents across a series of related categories, as tabulated in Appendix C and represented in Figure 3, including steam locomotives and associated apparatus such as boilers, springs and buffers, etc. reveals railway-related patents of the order of 890, as compared with 239 listed in the
Abridgements of Specifications relating to Railways for the same period.
Figure 3: Patents relating to railways ranked according to process, for the period 1800-1852.
Source: Woodcroft, Subject-matter Index (1854), 523-536.
21 John Gray, Steam engines and apparatus connected therewith …, Patent No 7745, July 26, 1838.
22 William Bridges Adams and Robert Richardson, Construction of Railways …, Patent No. 11715, May 24,
1847.
23 Bennet Woodcroft, Subject-matter Index (made from titles only) of Patents of Invention 1617-1852, (London:
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The data presented in Figures 2 and 3 underscore the quantity of, and marked acceleration in railway- related patents during the first half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the statistics emphasise the value of sector-specific analysis in any assessment of the processes of innovation and technological change. This approach is at variance with much scholarly analysis which is generally focused on the emerging industrial sector as a whole. Sullivan, for example, who relies heavily on Woodcroft’s work, has written extensively in relation to patent statistics and their value in determining the timing and nature of innovation.24 Many of his conclusions, based on an overall analysis of patent numbers, are relevant to this thesis, not least his opinion that the patent system had a central role in encouraging invention and innovation.25 According to Sullivan, from the mid eighteenth century a number of elements came together to trigger an acceleration of invention. However, the evidence considered in this thesis challenges his observation that railway technology was a ‘relative latecomer’, experiencing its inventive acceleration in the decade 1811 to 1820.26 The seemingly arbitrary choice of the period 1811 to 1820 is not explained by Sullivan, and it is not supported either by the evidence considered in later chapters of this thesis, or by analysis of Woodcroft’s collation, Abridgements relating to Railways. As shown in Figure 2, and notwithstanding that the number of patented inventions is almost certainly understated, a more appropriate estimate of the period of acceleration in railway-related patenting rates would be 1820 to 1850.
The arguments constructed in the previous chapter support Sullivan’s conclusion that there is no evidence that rules or regulations altered the costs and benefits of obtaining a patent around the mid eighteenth century.27 The evidence considered here also supports Sullivan’s proposal that the propensity to patent lies in the distinction between patentable and nonpatentable inventions, that many inventions of the period, such as biological and organisational changes in farming, were not patentable. Sullivan identifies the acceleration of patent grants to be evidence of the rapid and widespread economic changes associated with the Industrial Revolution, that the acceleration in patentable invention is evidence that England had entered her Age of Invention.28 Sullivan’s distinction between patentable and nonpatentable inventive activity is an important one, and the evidence considered in later chapters of this thesis endorses his conclusion that patenting rates had an identifiable impact on the growth of certain macro- technologies, including the early railways. However, he is surprisingly dismissive of the value of
24 Richard Sullivan, "England's Age of Invention: The Acceleration of Patents and Patentable Invention During
the Industrial Revolution," Explorations in Economic History 26, (1989): 424-452; Richard Sullivan, "The Revolution of Ideas: Widespread Patenting and Invention During the English Industrial Revolution," The
Journal of Economic History 2, (1990): 349-362; Richard Sullivan, "Estimates of the Value of Patent Rights in
Great Britain and Ireland 1852-1876", Economica 61, (1994): 37-58; Richard Sullivan, "Patent Counts and Textile Invention; A Comment on Griffiths, Hunt and O'Brien," Journal of Economic History 55, (1995): 666- 670.
25 Sullivan, "Estimates of the Value of Patent Rights,” 37. 26 Sullivan, "England's Age of Invention,” 355.
27 Sullivan, "The Revolution of Ideas,” 351. 28 Sullivan, "England's Age of Invention,” 424.
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industry-specific analysis. An opinion that is challenged by the findings of the investigation undertaken here.
It is pertinent to the arguments made in this thesis that Sullivan identified the acceleration in patented inventions in the latter part of the eighteenth century as having caused a significant change in England's ‘knowledge process'.29 He proposed that technical development is a three-part progression of creation, dissemination and application of inventions. Whilst Sullivan is correct in his assessment, this thesis seeks to emphasise the significant contribution of patented technological knowledge that was available to inventors, accessible from official Chancery records and technical journals of the day. The contemporary evidence considered in this thesis suggests that the availability of patented technological data may have had an important role, hitherto largely unrecognised, in facilitating the step-change in the management and control of the knowledge process of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sullivan made his initial observations in 1989, and in 1992 Crafts and Harley published a seminal paper arguing that the Industrial Revolution was a more gradual economic change, initially restricted to only a handful of modernized sectors.30 Nevertheless, Sullivan has continued to argue that the sharp acceleration of patent numbers took place across a broad industrial front. It is of relevance to this thesis that Sullivan identifies developments in the inventions of machinery as having raised the overall propensity to patent. He identifies approximately 46.6 per cent of total patents taken out between 1801 and 1850 were for machines, the era when steam engines were perfected for the textile and railway industries. According to Sullivan, the widespread increase in patenting indicates that perceived profits from invention increased over the entire spectrum of industries and this led to a macroeconomic 'trigger' mechanism.31 This theme, the link between propensity to patent and perceived profits, is considered in more detail in the following chapter.
The analysis undertaken here supports Sullivan’s conclusion that assessing patent data in relation to overall inventive activity is unreliable, particularly since not all inventions were patentable. However, he has also suggested that evaluation of data relating to the renewal of patents could provide an indicator of the ratio of patents to patentable inventions, the propensity to patent. Sullivan makes a connection between a patentee’s decision to renew a patent and the value of patent rights. He seeks to establish a correlation between the two distinct concepts of the value of a patent right (the ability to secure a monopoly, financial return) and the economic value of an invention (which, according to Sullivan, may be measured by the discounted value of resources saved as a result of the invention).32 This proposal merits examination in relation to early railway technology. During the period under consideration here,
29 Sullivan, "England's Age of Invention,” 447.
30 Nicholas F.R. Crafts and C. Knick Harley, "Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A
restatement of the Crafts-Harley view," Economic History Review 45, (1992): 703-730.
31 Sullivan, "The Revolution of Ideas,” 359.
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the process of prolongation of a patent, the ability to extend the term of the patent, rested either with Parliament or the Privy Council and the evidence demonstrates that both the initial period of patents and the renewed terms varied widely. Prior to 1835, prolongation was obtained by a private Act of Parliament and some twenty-five applications were considered by various parliamentary select committees.33 According to Woodcroft’s evidence before aparliamentary select committee in 1851, the initial periods of the earliest patents varied between twelve, twenty-one and thirty-one years.34 Following Lord Brougham’s Act in 1835, applications for extensions were made to the Privy Council, and between 1835 and 1852 some seventy-seven35 applications were considered, when it was the practice of the Privy Council to prolong for a further seven years in appropriate cases.36 The test applied by both Parliament and the Privy Council in considering applications for prolongation was one of benefit to the public and, significantly, whether the patent had demonstrably failed to reward the patentee, an issue that is explored more fully in the following chapter. By way of example, James Watt’s patent for a separate condenser was granted in 1769 and subsequently extended by an Act of Parliament in 1775 for a further term of twenty-five years.37
Notwithstanding the preceding discussion about the variable monopoly periods for patents when originally granted, and the non-standard periods of prolongation, a number of studies have evaluated inventive activity by reference to renewal data. The scholarship in this area is generally concerned with the period post-1852, which was something of a watershed following the imposition of a renewal regime by the Patent Law Amendment Act. The 1852 Act sought to ensure a full period of fourteen years for the life of a patent with an initial fee payable at the time of application, followed by further instalments at three and seven years. Nevertheless, during the second half of the nineteenth century, post the 1852 reforms, it was still possible to extend a patent for a significant period. In 1864, Robert Fairlie patented a locomotive characterised by having two boilers, and in 1878 he persuaded the Privy Council to prolong his patent for an additional term of seven years on the ground of insufficiency of remuneration.38 Schankerman pioneered the approach of evaluating inventive activity by reference to renewal data, and in a study with Pakes, for the period 1950 to 1976, assumed that it was an indicator of the value of a patented invention if the patentee was prepared to expend on renewal fees to prolong the period of
33 Dutton, The Patent System and Inventive Activity, 155.
34 Evidence of Bennet Woodcroft, May 22, 1851, Report and Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select
Committee of the House of Lords appointed to consider of the Bill, intituled, "An ACT Further to Amend the Law Touching Letters Patent for Inventions (House of Lords, July 4, 1851), 243
35 Dutton, The Patent System and Inventive Activity, 155.
36 Richard Godson, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Patents for Inventions and of Copyright, (London:
Saunders and Benning, 1840) Appendix, 12.
37 An Act vesting in James Watt, engineer, the sole use and property of certain steam engines … of his invention