Notes Illustrative of Mr. Macfie’s Speech
[Page 17.]
The views taken in the text as to the meaning of the word “manufacture” receive confirmation from the following extract from the Engineer of June 4, 1869:—
The American Patent-Law
... Accordingly, in the first general Patent-Law passed by Congress, the subject for which Patents were to be granted were described as the invention or discovery of “any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement therein not before known or used.” In the next statute—that of 21st February, 1793—the phraseology was first introduced which has been ever since employed—namely, “any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement in any art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, not known or used before the application for a Patent.”... We have, then, the following four heads of subjects suitable for Patents—viz., an art, a machine, a manufacture, and a composition of matter.... In England, to make a new process the subject of a Patent, the word “manufacture” would be used, and would have to be interpreted somewhat liberally. Thus, in some cases, there might not be a perfect distinction between the thing itself and the art or process of making the thing.... With regard to the head “manufacture,” we cannot do better than give the definition which Mr. Curtis has added as a note to his work. He says a manufacture “would be any new combination of old materials, constituting a new result or production in the form of a vendible article, not being machinery.”...
As well as from the following extract from—
Hindmarch on “Vending or Selling.”
“The sole privilege of making the invention as expressed... is in truth the same in substance as the sole privilege of using and exercising it.... By the first section of the Statute of Monopolies, patents granting ‘the sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything’ are declared to be void, and the proviso in favour of inventions contained in the sixth section only extends to ‘grants of privilege of the sole working or making of any manner of new manufactures,’ leaving the sole buying or selling of anything within the prohibition.... The sole privilege granted by a Patent for an invention authorises the inventor ’to make, use, exercise, and vend’ the invention.... And as no one can use the invention except the patentee, no one besides him can lawfully have such articles for sale.... Every part of the privilege granted by a Patent for an invention, when thus explained (!) is therefore clearly within the meaning of the exception contained in the Statute....”
I demur. Is there anything in the Statute to prevent a person importing articles and vending them though the same as the privileged person is alone allowed to make or work? In point of fact that surely might, when the statute was passed, be done from Scotland and Ireland as to manufactures not patented in these countries, but patented in England.
[Page 18.]
The number of Patents granted in the first fifty years after the Statute of Monopolies was seventy-two, or at the rate of less than one and a-half per annum.
[Page 19.]
The following list of applications for Patents up to the end of 1862, in several classes, is abridged from Mr. Edwards’ interesting treatise on, or rather against, “Letters Patent for Inventions:”—
| Oct., 1852, to Dec. 31, 1862. | Before Oct., 1852. | Total. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Railways and Railway Carriages | 1,418 | 630 | 2,018 |
| Telegraphs | 558 | 109 | 667 |
| Steam and Steam Boilers | 1,293 | 377 | 1,670 |
| Steam-engines | 1,228 | 704 | 1,932 |
| Spinning | 1,837 | 1,120 | 2,957 |
| Electricity, Galvanism, and Electroplating | 662 | 38 | 700 |
| Sewing and Embroidery | 352 | 40 | 392 |
| Heating and Evaporating | 1,108 | 373 | 1,481 |
| Fireplaces, Grates | 317 | 169 | 481 |
| Flues and Chimneys | 278 | 75 | 353 |
| Fuel | 227 | 129 | 356 |
| Ventilating Buildings, Carriages, Ships, &c. | 392 | 81 | 473 |
Suggestive Extracts From Dr. Percy’s Works on Metallurgy
[Page 34.]
The Copper Trade
It would be sheer waste of time even to notice many of the mis-called improvements in copper—something for which Patents have been granted in this country during the last twenty years. Some of the patentees display such deplorable ignorance of the first principles of chemistry, and such utter want of practical knowledge, as would seem hardly possible with the present facilities of acquiring information.
Various Patents have been granted for alleged improvements in the treating of copper ores, of certain products obtained in the smelting of copper ores, &c., which are only worthy of notice as affording, as I conceive, satisfactory illustrations of the defective state of our existing Patent-Laws.... That a man who has worked out an original and valuable process from his own brain, and who may have incurred great expenses in bringing it to a practical issue—it may be, after years of protracted toil and anxiety—should have secured to him by law during a moderate term the exclusive privilege of reaping the substantial reward of his own invention, appears to me as just and reasonable as that an author should be protected against piratical and unprincipled publishers. But that the law should confer upon a man the exclusive right of appropriating to his own benefit facts which are perfectly familiar to every tyro in chemistry, and of practising operations which are of daily occurrence in the laboratories of chemists, is as impolitic as it is unjust. And surely, the particular “inventions” above referred to belong to this category. I cordially subscribe to the opinion expressed by Mr. Grove, Q.C.—namely, that the real object of Patent-Law was to reward not trivial inventions, which stop the way to greater improvements, but substantial boons to the public; not changes such as any experimentalist makes a score a day in his laboratory, but substantial, practical discoveries, developed into an available form.
The Hot Blast
It cannot strictly be termed a great invention, for what great exercise of the inventive faculty could it possibly have required for its development? There was no elaborate working out of a process or machine, as has been the case in many inventions, but the thing was done at once. Without wishing in the smallest degree to detract from the merit to which Mr. Neilson is justly entitled, I may nevertheless express my opinion that the hot-blast was a lucky hit rather than an invention, properly so-called. Whatever opinion may be entertained as to the expediency of Patents, there can be no doubt that such a Patent as this ought never to have been granted. A Patent, even though it may be proved invalid, confers upon its possessor a locus standi in the eye of the law, and enables him thereby to involve innocent persons in most expensive litigation, to say nothing of the attendant annoyance and anxiety. The preliminary examination before the Attorney or Solicitor-General is in many cases an absolute farce, and nothing less. The present system, although confessedly an improvement on the old one, is yet in many cases highly obstructive and injurious to national interests.
[Page 50.]
The following passage from the Engineer of May 28, proves clearly that the Bessemer Patents do raise prices of iron:—
The present royalty on rails is 2l. per ton; on each ton a drawback of 1l. is nominally allowed, but the nature of Mr. Bessemer’s arrangements with regard to scrap, crop ends, waste, &c., is such that the true royalty on every ton of Bessemer rails delivered to a railway company—in other words, sold—amounts to about 1l. 5s. 6d. After the lapse of Mr. Bessemer’s Patents in February, 1870, this sum, all but 2s. 6d. per ton royalty on plant, will be saved; and, therefore, in March next year, rails may be bought for at least 1l. 3s. per ton less than they cost now.
Working Men as Inventors
[Page 62.]
Somewhat to my surprise, I am led to apprehend that the interest of working men will be represented as coinciding with retention of invention monopoly. I hope they are too wide awake to believe such a fallacy, and too upright to approve of the continuance of a proved national disadvantage, even though it were not a fallacy. If Patents are injurious to the community by raising prices of articles of consumption and utility, then the operative and labouring classes, inasmuch as they constitute the bulk of the population, must be the chief sufferers. If Patents interfere with labour in any direction, and tend to drive trade away from our island, they, as the mainstays of industry, must be the chief sufferers. The only pretence for such an allegation as I am combating is this: some inventions in all trades, many inventions in some trades, are made by artisans, who therefore will lose this form of reward. True enough; but is the reward to these few individuals a compensation for the evils inflicted on the many—the millions? and is not the reward often so like the gift of a white elephant, or the catching of a Tartar—so much of a delusion, a difficulty, a disadvantage, a snare, a ruin—that their wisest counsellors would warn against its fascination, especially if through their own favour for my propositions there is the choice of fair and satisfactory alternative recompenses? The position of working men in respect to Patents is frequently dealt with in this compilation; their attention and co-operation I respectfully invite.
The Inventors’ Institute
An Inventors’ Institute has been formed for the purpose of maintaining the Patent System, and amending it in such a way as, I fear and am sure, will only make its yoke more galling and its burden heavier. The public will do well to remember that, in spite of the name, this is rather a society of patentees, including in its membership a portion only of those inventors who take Patents, and not including the innumerable inventors who do not take Patents, and who suffer by the system which the Institute is intended to perpetuate, extend, and knit more tightly on us all and in the first place on them. The honoured names who direct that society will do well to consider who are inventors and what are inventions. If they would but reflect that we are almost to a man inventors in the sense in which the great mass of patentees are such, and that the majority of inventions which choke the Patent-office are such as themselves, at any rate, would disdain to claim and scorn to annoy their fellows by patenting, they would probably arrive at the conviction—which is half-way on the road to complete emancipation of trade from the fetters they hug—that the system is so practically bad that rectification is hopeless, and would join in endeavours, not to amend what is, even theoretically, defective and bad, but to devise and introduce a thoroughly good substitute. I hope the present publication will not be in vain, when it endeavours to remove well-meaning prepossessions by force of truth.
Justification of State Rewards
[Page 81.]
It is just and expedient that the public exchequer should pay inventors, because—1. The State is entitled, or required, to undertake all beneficent and useful works which, while they ought to be done for or by the nation, yet cannot be so well, or at all, done by individuals. 2. Though individuals, more than the nation collectively, will reap the benefit of these payments, it is manifest that the range of inventive improvement is so wide that on the average of years every portion of the community, and every individual in all portions, will share the benefit pretty equally. 3. The demand for remunerating inventors proceeds from the State, not manufacturers or producers. 4. These last cannot, under the régime of free trade, pass over from their own shoulders upon those of consumers—who are the real, because ultimate, recipients of the benefit—the burden of royalties, or other payments to inventors. 5. The charge of £200,000 per annum is, after all, on a population of thirty-two millions but a poll-tax of three halfpence per head. On how easy terms would we obtain for the nation a universal, prompt enjoyment of every novelty, and complete emancipation of our commerce and manufactures from an incubus and thraldom which are every day becoming more depressing!
The Patent-Office Establishment
[Page 86.]
The Patent-office in Southampton-buildings, Chancery-lane, is an establishment highly creditable to its organisers, but far too little known. Its free consulting library should be more frequented. The publications there sold at a cheap rate, and presented gratuitously to public institutions which undertake to keep them for reference under fitting regulations, are invaluable. The indexes, manuscript and printed, there kept, are elaborate, and include lists of scientific and practical matter affecting commerce and the arts, culled from periodicals issued in all countries. No change in our manner of dealing with inventions can deprive us of, or supersede the use of, such an accessible storehouse of useful knowledge. The wonder is, that its advantages are not more extensively availed of, and that so few even of our great towns have applied for sets of its specifications and indexes. There is, in spite of the establishment’s excellence, room for improvement in several respects, one of which is in the providing better means for connecting itself with the mass of the people in the provinces.
“The New Canadian Patent-Law.—The Patent Bill which has been for some time before the Parliament of the Dominion, has passed. The hope, to which we alluded a few weeks ago, that the Bill might be modified to enable Americans to obtain Patents in Canada, has not been fulfilled; and the only effect of the Bill, so far as we are interested, is to shut out American inventors from a larger amount of territory than before.”—Extract from “American Artisan,” June 20, 1869.