The U.S. Patent Office and the Sponsorship of Science, 1836-1862

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed dissertation is a history US patent administration from the Constitution through the Civil War, which tracks the changing mandate for patents in an environment of territorial acquisition and economic development. The dissertation argues that understanding the history of patenting requires an analysis of its institutional context in a federal bureaucracy committed to scientific and economic progress. Although the Constitution directed that limited monopolies be issued to authors and inventors, it specified that their function was "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." The Patent Office's leadership acted on this broad intention rather than its narrow expression. After 1836, the agency not only elaborated a new system of patent examination with the aid of a corps of scientific men. It also sponsored the production of agricultural and meteorological statistics, the global collection and distribution of seeds, experiments in breeding, hybridization, and chemical fertilizers, and the administration of a natural history museum managed in collaboration with the National Institute for the Promotion of Science. The Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant will support research into the Patent Office's scientific programs between 1836, when the modern system of patent examination was instituted, and 1862, when its agricultural programs were transferred to the newly formed USDA. The intellectual merit of this project is its study of an important and neglected institution. To date historians have regarded the scientific programs of the Patent Office as antecedents to those of the Smithsonian and the USDA, among others. But a bureaucracy reaching through so many areas of scientific development warrants study on its own terms. The Patent Office did not share the mandates of these agencies, and its foundational sponsorship of science must be considered in light of its own directive to promote science and useful arts through the distribution of property rights in invention. Moreover, examining the history of the Patent Office, as distinct from patenting, clarifies the boundaries of intellectual property doctrines that came to justify both. After 1836, patent examiners with scientific qualifications made new decisions about what was patentable, interpreting on a case-by-case basis the 1793 Patent Act's stipulation that "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof may obtain a patent." Meanwhile, the Agricultural Division collaborated with entrepreneurial farmers, agriculturalists, chemists, and geologists, sponsoring research intended for publication, not patent protection. This dissertation asks these diverse scientific practices shaped the bureaucratic practice of patenting and the concomitant development of intellectual property ideology. It suggests that examining how agricultural science was pursued in a very different patent regime can provide perspective on the current one. The broader impact of this study is its provision of a historical context for an area of law and policy of contemporary importance. A growing number of economists, legal scholars, and historians have analyzed the recent expansion of patent activity, including the expansive claims of the biotechnology industry in plant and genome patents; their implications for scientific authorship and university research; and debates over the enforcement of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) through the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). This dissertation builds on these investigations while shifting its focus away from legislative and judicial debates over intellectual property toward the diverse practices of the institution charged with their administration. The investigator proposes that neither the history of patents or scientific development should be abstracted from their institutional contexts, arguing that recovering its diverse forms of state sponsored science is essential to understanding both the political economic function of patents and the ideological constitution of property claims in ideas.