The City we all love

To help understand why patent rights not only encourage inventors but also promote the wider diffusion of new technology for the benefit of society, economic historians Naomi Lamoreaux and the late Kenneth Sokoloff suggested the following thought experiment: Imagine a world in which there was no patent system to guarantee inventors property rights to their discoveries. In such a world, inventors would have every incentive to be secretive and to guard jealously their discoveries from competitors [because those discoveries] could, of course, be copied with impunity. “By contrast, in a world where property rights in invention were protected, the situation would be very different. Inventors would now feel free to promote their discoveries as widely as possible so as to maximize returns either from commercializing their ideas themselves or from [licensing] rights to the idea to others. The protections offered by the patent system would thus be an important stimulus to the exchange of technological information in and of themselves. Moreover, it is likely that the cross -fertilization that resulted from these information flows would be a potent stimulus to technological change.

From the earliest days of the United States, patent and legal records show how inventors (including Thomas Edison) regularly kept abreast of developments in their fields. They did this by studying patent descriptions published by both the USPTO as well as by industry publications such as Scientific American, which was founded in 1845 by Munn and Company, the leading patent agency of the nineteenth century, expressly to spread new technological knowledge and facilitate the buying and selling of patents. For example, Elias E. Reis—inventor of a number of devices to exploit the heat generated by electrical currents—reported that when he read in the Official Gazette in 1886 about a patent issued to Elihu Thomson for a new method of electric welding, “there immediately opened up to my mind a field of new applications to which I saw I could apply my system of producing heat in large quantities.”vi In many industries, specialized journals kept readers informed about new patents of interest.

As with any economic and legal instrument, patents have the potential to slow innovation if their grant of exclusive rights is too broad. But the overwhelming preponderance of economic research and real-world experience demonstrate that, on balance, intellectual property rights tend to stimulate invention, economic growth, and the diffusion of new technological knowledge in every country where they exist. This fact by itself, however, does not explain why the U.S. patent system became a model for much of the world. To understand why it did—and how it helped build the most successful economy in the history of the world—we must examine the revolutionary design of the U.S. patent system itself and the ways in which it overcame the weaknesses of earlier patent systems.