Everyone knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Except for those who know it was really invented by Elisha Gray. Or Antonio Meucci. Or Philipp Reis. And wasn't Thomas Edison somehow involved? Since the day in February 1876 when Bell and Gray each filed a competing application with the U.S. Patent Office, people have argued about the paternity of the telephone. The first thing Christopher Beauchamp shows in his excellent new book is that any true answer to the question “who invented the telephone?” must have as much to do with patents and lawyers as with inventors.
Invented by Law combines a detailed history of the telephone patents—“the most valuable intellectual property of the nineteenth century and likely the most consequential patent ever granted” (p. 3)—with a broader history of patent law in both the United States and Britain, and of the role of law in the history of invention. As Beauchamp demonstrates, patents and patent litigation played a huge role in the “second industrial revolution” of the late nineteenth century. Besides the telephone, epic legal battles were waged over the telegraph, the sewing machine, electric lighting, vulcanized rubber, baking soda, barbed wire, and more. These patent fights were entangled with partisan politics and of course great sums of money, and they shaped the course of industrial development in far-reaching ways.
Patents, Beauchamp argues, were never merely a moat against competition. They had deep constitutive effects too. Patents formed the “sinews” of new industries like the emerging Bell System, channeling money and linking companies from coast to coast long before any wires did the same (p. 163). Indeed, Beauchamp encourages us to see the telephone itself as an invention of the patent courts, both in the sense that legal decisions shaped its technical form, but also in the sense that we even conceive of this immense telecommunication system as a single device with one inventor. Convincing the U.S. courts to regard telephone technology as a single invention was one of the American Bell Telephone Company's greatest victories. In Britain, key decisions went a different way, and Bell had to share the glory and the industry with Thomas Edison and others.
Beauchamp says that patent law has been unjustly neglected by historians, even legal historians, in part because of a belief that it is unavoidably technical and complex. This book may not entirely dispel that reputation, but it does make clear that historians of industrial-age technology, business, and the economy must reckon with patent law. Beauchamp does us all a great service by opening up the black box of patent litigation. He does not shy away from complexity and the points discussed are sometimes fine, but he has a knack for clearly and patiently walking his readers through legal, political, technological, and commercial particulars to reveal the full significance of patents and patent law. His engaging narrative shows how legal strategies crystallized around small technical and even semantic details—an instrument damaged on its way to court, the precise definition of the word “diaphragm” (pp. 147, 158); these strategies then shaped corporate structures, which in turn produced immense commercial and technological realities.
One extremely valuable aspect of Invented By Law is its comparative angle. Throughout the book, Beauchamp compares the histories of the telephone in the United States and Britain, where patent battles had very different outcomes, with lasting implications for each country. Successive chapters cover the history of patent law and litigation, the origins of the telephone, major court cases over the telephone patents in both the United States and Britain, the effects of patent law on corporate strategy and structure, and the coming of competition in the 1890s and 1900s after Bell's American patents expired. Beauchamp closes with brief thoughts on the explosion of patent litigation in the so-called “third industrial revolution” of our own time. Though they do tell one overarching story, his chapters seem written to stand on their own. Some anecdotes and background information are repeated in more than one place, but as a result, any chapter in this book could easily be anthologized or assigned to students.
Beauchamp's brilliant, careful work will explode any simple generalizations about who invented what or about what patents really do. Indeed, I am now convinced that historians cannot fully understand industrial change, the rise and fall of great companies, the age of the independent inventor and the corporate laboratory, or the vaunted gales of disruptive innovation (and the many innovations that unaccountably fail to disrupt) without exploring the history of patents and patent law. The first step in doing so is to read this outstanding book.
