Purity vs Property? The Patenting context of constructing “pure” and “applied” electricity 1880-1920”.

1. Purity vs Property? The Patenting context of constructing “pure” and “applied” electricity 1880-1920”. Graeme Gooday & Stathis Arapostathis

2. Tensions in electrical techno-science • Overlap of physics & early electrical engineering • Cases of Henry Rowland (US), Oliver Lodge (UK) • Both take out patents & appeal for ‘pure’ science • A paradox? Historians of physics discomfort! • Kline: not a matter of physicists doing ‘pure science’ & electrical engineers doing ‘applied’. • How did they manage their inventive research? • How did they represent it? Who had access to it? • What did ‘pure’ science and patenting represent? • Not necessarily mutually opposed: institution building, family obligation, anti-monopolism • But considerable ambivalence about prerogatives

3. Patents held in early electro-technology USA • Thomas Edison c.1093 (& 1239 non-US) • Henry Rowland 26+ UK • William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) 70+ • Silvanus P.Thompson 62 • Oliver Lodge 31 • William Preece 12 • Arthur Heaviside 6 • Oliver Heaviside 1 • James Clerk Maxwell 0

4. Patenting – protecting knowledge? • Patents: a historical-legal claim to temporal priority in applying technical principles to artefact • Temporary monopoly on use/manufacture (license) • Potential source of income if protection not costly • Corporate litigation for patent infringement – lucrative means of enforcing knowledge monopoly! • But patents not necessarily at odds with ‘intellectual commons’ of scientific research • Many only patent defensively to avoid monopoly by others; physicists rarely bother to license or litigate • Problem of openness: until 1907 prior revelation in a scientific paper would render a UK patent invalid.

5. 19thC ‘pure’ science: sponsored autonomy? • Appeal for ‘pure science’ from 1870s (Herzig) • Category naturalized in 20thC, untenable in 21stC? • ‘Purity’ of motivation? Inapplicability? Contested… • Contrast ‘abstract science’ and ‘basic science’ • Non-recognition by Lord Kelvin, Lord Moulton etc • Request for financial sponsorship with autonomy: right to free research & duty of others to pay! • Division of labour: pure researchers and appliers • Justificatory appeal to historical-causal claim: ‘pure science’ yields practical benefits • Rewriting of history of science-industry nexus

6. Historicizing the pure-applied nexus • Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science Applied & pure sciences mutuallyindependent • Mid 19thC ‘applied science’ = ‘practical’ knowledge • “Applied science” ≠ applied ‘pure’ science • Bud: Tory KCL institutionalizes industrial practice as ‘applied science’ – a form of academic domestication • Gooday: Late 19thC physicists/chemists invent causal myth of ‘pure science’ to claim moral priority in H.E. • Replacement for older Anglo-American term ‘abstract science’, and attack on dominance of ‘applied science’ • Aspirational propaganda for autonomous physical science: Lodge & Rowland argue for pure science to transcend commercial culture of industry/patents.

7. Times obituary of Lord Kelvin December 1907: There cannot, he once remarked, be a greater mistake than that of looking superciliously upon the practical applications which are the life and soul of science… his scientific enquiries were accordingly pursued with a keen eye for practical application. Kelvin: contrasting posthumous views Balfour, unveiling Kelvin statue, Oct 1913: That a professor of pure science should have been also the leading spirit in submarine telegraphy and that he should have done so much for navigation was surely one of those felicitous coincidences which had never occurred before and probably was never likely to occur again.

8. Oliver Heaviside – unworldly patentee? • Left Post Office telegraph service to lived with parents in London, 1874 • Oliver’s sole patent: 1880 #1407 ‘Preventing induction between adjacent telegraph & telephone lines • 1887-93 published on applying Maxwell to theory of inductive loading: minimize distortion on phone lines • Reward: UK government pension 1896 • 1899-1900: Michael Pupin seeks US patent for application of Heaviside • Initially rejected due to Heaviside’s prior publication, but later succeeds • Pupin wealthy - Heaviside outraged!

9. Henry Rowland (1848-1901) First Professor of Physics, Johns Hopkins 1875 • Trained as a civil engineer, early work in electromagnetism, thermodynamics and optics • ‘A Plea for Pure Science’ AAAS 1883 – controversial. • 26+ patents (1882-1903) e.g. • Diffraction gratings • Electrical power engineering • Multiplex telegraphy Ruling engine c.1883 Patented process: universal product – Rowland grating

10. Reconciling Rowland’s patents & purity • Standard account: diabetes diagnosed in 1890; patent income needed to support family • BUT does not fit the broader pattern of career • In 1868 Rowland sought patent for multiplex telegraph – denied support by his mother. • 1882 patented screw thread technique for his diffraction gratings (& kept machine design secret) • Rebuffs Edison’s approaches to co-patent 1880-83… but becomes electrical engineering consultant • Blood sugar diagnosis in 1890 not serious – gets health insurance anyway prior to marriage • Does not patent again until 1893-4 – opportunistic encounter with Cataract Construction Co (Niagara) • No debilitating illness till 1900 - cause of death unclear. Diary c.1900 retrospective claims…

11. Rowland’s knowledge management • Lab funded by Johns Hopkins but Rowland seeks financial independence to avoid university politics • Screw patent income pays for lab assistant Schneider: issues diffraction gratings free to many • Electrical consultancy and patents an opportunity to apply Maxwellian theories to new technologies • Birth of children Henry 1892 and Davidge 1897 are what prompt by intensive patenting. • Multiplex telegraphy 1897 brings little new profit • Posthumously patents bring little income to widow

12. Oliver Lodge, (1851 -1940) First Professor of Physics, University College Liverpool, 1881 Principal, University of Birmingham 1900-1919 Ether theorist & Maxwellian populariser 31 patents (with others) Syntony (radio tuning) Spark plugs Lightning conductors Smoke deposits 12 children (1878-1906) “University of Birmingham, Vanity Fair, 1904

13. Lodge and hi-tech Maxwellian physics 1880s Theorises mechanical ether – tests ether characteristics by mechanical means Did mechanical motion carry ether? Lodge more successful in wireless – coherer for detecting waves Syntony system for tuning –widely adopted in early wireless. Not monopolistic: only sued for infringement against Marconi 1907 when latter made large profits ‘Whirling machine’ at Liverpool, 1893. Mather and Platt dynamos not visible in this picture

14. Lodge on the researcher’s dilemma • The instinct of the scientific worker is to publish everything, to hope that any useful aspect of it may be as quickly as possible utilized, and to trust to the instinct of fair play that he shall not be the loser when the things becomes commercially profitable. To grant him a monopoly is to grant him a move than doubtful boon; to grant him the privilege of fighting for his monopoly is to grant him a pernicious privilege, which will sap his energy, was his time, and destroy his power of future production. • Oliver Lodge, Signalling Without Wires (1901), pp.50-1

15. Principal Lodge on ‘Pure Science’ Times Feb 28 1901 The first Principal of new University of Birmingham tells local IEE branch electrical engineers they must respect ‘pure science’. Demarcating a division of labour between University and IEE: former can teach pure science, defying the ‘unregenerate man’

16. Conclusion: Managing conflicting obligations • Rowland and Lodge caught between conflicting obligations to research, fellow professionals, laboratory co-workers, students and family. • Resolution: generate income from commercial work esp. from patents • Moral high ground: avoid patent litigation against infringers unless naked exploitation apparent. • Promote funded pure science for future practitioners to be spared such conflicts • But ‘Pure science’ long remains controversial as category of knowledge making…

17. ‘WW1: Fletcher Moulton dissents • … I do not share the fear that so-called Pure Science is in danger of being neglected in the revival of industrial effort to which we all look forward. The distinction between Pure Science and Applied science is vague and artificial and, so far as my observation goes, it does not exists as a guiding principle in the minds of those classes to whom we must look for the force which will place Science in its right position in England. It is a distinction which is more actively present to the minds of those who are engaged in abstruse research than to the mind of the general public. Introduction to Science and the Nation, 1917