Rooms Near Chancery Lane: The Patent Office under the Commissioners, 1852-1883 (review)

Rooms Near Chancery Lane: The Patent Office under the Commissioners, 1852-1883. By John Hewish. London: British Library, 2000. Pp. xii+173. £35.

This slim and tersely written history of the mid-Victorian British Patent Office begs for expansion. With its notes, it should certainly help stimulate and inform the research of any future writer of a sequel to the studies by Christine MacLeod (Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660-1800 [1988]) and Harold I. Dutton (The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1852 [1984]). John Hewish's scope, however, is explicitly much narrower: "There is a large and still fast growing literature on patents generally and on the history of the English system; emphasis has been on law, the relation of patents to economics and the history of technology. . . . This study is not much about such things as patentability, claim drafting, the relation of invention to innovation. . . . It is the story of an office during a period of change" (p. xi).

Those first thirty years of the Patent Office began with the intended but incomplete "reform" of a complicated and fee-bedeviled patenting process and ended with the establishment of professional patent examiners as distinct from clerks. Most of the credit for actually making patent information open to inventors and the public during those years goes to the indefatigable Bennet Woodcroft--inventor, patent agent, Society of Arts member, and historian of technology--who, under the commissioners, was superintendent of specifications, in charge of one of the two divisions of the new office from 1852 until his retirement in 1876. He was succeeded by the improbably named H. Reader Lack. A list of the Patent Office staff as of April 1880, including the four commissioners, appears in the appendix.

The first chapter, while outlining in three pages "some unoriginal history" of the English patent system for centuries before establishment of the Patent Office, remarks laconically, "One can imagine a system of protecting the rights of inventors springing fully formed from a legislature, but that has not been the English way" (p. 1). The next ten chapters show the slow evolution of the Patent Office. They discuss "approaches to reform" proposed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century; the eventual Patent Law Amendment Act of July 1852 that established the Patent Office; the way in which the office was housed and staffed under Woodcroft and his patent (grant) division counterpart, Leonard Edmunds; their conflicts; the scandal that forced the resignation in 1865 of Edmunds, "a victim of the changing morality of the Victorian era" (p. 74); the inclusion of design and trademark copyrights in 1875-76; the growth of public dissatisfaction and parliamentary attempts to revise the system; and finally the passage of the Patents, Designs and Trade Marks Act of 1883. This act abolished commissioners and established patent examiners who were chosen on the basis of competitive examination on scientific topics to decide on the validity of patent applications. H. Reader Lack became comptroller in the new simplified administration.

The twelfth chapter, a postscript about the first generation of patent examiners, mentions (p. 112) that "the next major administrative change was the introduction of the investigation for novelty," in 1902. (Examiners in the U.S. Patent Office had been doing this since 1836.) Chapters 13 and 14, also implicitly postscripts, give the histories, respectively, of the Patent Office Museum as predecessor to the Science Museum in South Kensington and the Patent Office Library up to 1902.

Apart from the book's fleeting flashes of understated humor, historians of technology in academia and museums will probably most value chapter 13, which describes the vagaries of acquiring such now famous industrial artifacts as the locomotives Rocket and Puffing Billy and Arkwright's original spinning frame, and chapter 6, which details Woodcroft's monumental accomplishments in disseminating patent information, in "a quixotic belief characteristic...