Combative patenting: Military entrepreneurship in First World War telecommunications

This paper examines how British patent rights for invention were affected by the vicissitudes of warfare looking especially at new communications technologies from the Crimean War up to the aftermath of the Great War. We can thus see longer-term continuities in the complexities of patenting innovations for military usage that avoid exceptionalist references to the pathologies of the “Chemists’ War.” I investigate how civilian and military inventors responded to the opportunities and constraints of military combat to assert personal rights against the claims of the state. Three case studies reveal contrasting facets of the complex relationship between inventor and state that cannot simply be captured by reference to the putative “property rights of invention.” Looking at service inventors of field telephones and the telegraphic Fullerphone and comparing their strategies with Marconi and Lodge’s use of patent royalties for post-war corporate expansion, reveals how far patent rights were matters of negotiation over the social contract of patenting, not simply about property rights of either state or inventor. The category of intellectual property rights for invention is thus historicized to show how the social contract underpinning the UK’s patent system could either be over-ridden by the state’s wartime management of innovation or subverted and/or appropriated for the ends of inventors.

► Three case studies explore patenting in Edwardian combat telecommunications devices.
► Civilian and military inventors resisted state ownership of combat innovations.
► Such inventors used various strategies to secure rewards for military utility.
► The Fullerphone showed telegraphy’s renewed capacity for defeating interception.
► Marconi’s enormous royalties from Great War wireless transformed his company.