Christine MacLeod

Teaching against the grain: multi‐disciplinary teamwork effectively delivers a successful undergraduate unit in sustainable development

A team‐taught interdisciplinary undergraduate unit in Sustainable Development has been developed and run over the past two years at the University of Bristol. This has been a unique initiative for this university to take. As in most other research‐intensive higher education institutions, teaching generally follows rather traditional disciplinary conventions, operating within departmental bounds. The initiative was unusual – and indeed ambitious – enough to gain the Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement (HEEPI) Green Gown Award in teaching for 2007 (HEEPI is a project supported by the Higher Education Founding Council for England; http://www.heepi.org.uk/green_gown_awards.htm). There are both challenges and pleasures in designing and delivering a team‐taught unit in a traditional university setting. This experience is outlined and evaluated here, giving consideration to both the practical and the more fundamentally philosophical issues encountered in the process.

Inventive Activities, Patents and Early Industrialisation: A Synthesis of Research Issues

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of recent research on the connection between patent systems and inventive activities in the early phases of industrialization. Perhaps surprisingly, no consensus has been reached yet as to whether the emergence of modern patent systems exerted a favourable impact on inventive activities. However, the recent literature has shed light on a number of important features concerning the functioning of patent systems and the nature of innovation processes in this period. The concluding section of the paper flags some promising directions for further research.

Reluctant Entrepreneurs: Patents and State Patronage in New Technosciences, circa 1870–1930

At a time when neoliberalism and financial austerity are together encouraging academic scientists to seek market alternatives to state funding, this essay investigates why, a century ago, their predecessors explicitly rejected private enterprise and the private ownership of ideas and inventions available to them through the patent system. The early twentieth century witnessed the success of a long campaign by British scientists to persuade the state to assume responsibility for the funding of basic research (“pure science”): their findings would enter the intellectual commons; their rewards would be primarily reputational (financial only secondarily, through consequent career advancement). The essay summarizes recent research in three separate fields of British technoscience—electricity, aviation, and agricultural botany—all of which were laying claim, at this time, to a heightened commercial or military importance that raised new questions about the ownership of scientific ideas. It suggests that each of the three established an idiosyncratic relationship with the patent system or with other forms of “intellectual property,” which would both influence their emergent disciplines and affect the extent to which commercial enterprise could remain a viable funding strategy.

Making waves: The Royal Navy's management of invention and innovation in steam shipping, 1815–1832 1

Abstract This paper explores the sources of invention and innovation in steam shipping, the distribution of funding and risk between the state and the private sector, and the Royal Navys management of innovation, during the experimental period of steam powers adoption at sea. It identifies two intersecting channels through which steam‐related innovations reached the Royal Navy. First, “packages” of innovations were embedded in the marine engines that were commissioned by the Navy from private engine‐making firms. Secondly, the Navy was spontaneously offered a gamut of ideas and inventions, which varied enormously both in potential importance and in degree of development. Although the mechanisms for dealing with these two channels were different, the end result was much the same ‐ in minimizing both the expense and the risk borne by the public sector. It was principally the private sector that was funding scientific and technological development in this sphere. Recognizing its own lack of expertise and consequent hazard, the Navy Board was developing a systematic yet flexible method of assessing steam‐related inventions ‐ which appears to have served it well.

Empiricism Afloat – Testing Steamboat Efficiency: Boulton Watt & Co. 1804–1830

The idea of the steam-propelled boat can be traced back to the sixteenth century, but it was not until the 1780s that it became a reality. Invention and innovation occurred in a number of different locations in France, America, and Britain from a small group of engineers who had previously (and continued to be) involved in the development of land-based steam power and its applications. In 1817 James Watt jnr. acquired Caledonia which had been built on the Clyde; it was re-engined and re-fitted to become a floating laboratory and, in the same year, after some trial runs on the Thames, he sailed to Rotterdam, taking with him an employee, James Brown, who was to become manager of Boulton Watt & Co.’s London office. The paper discusses whether, and to what extent, the experiment delivered valid results.

Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720-1844 (review)

At first glance only a useful “background” book for historians of technology, this is, in fact, a model study of the evolution of a technology, broadly defined. The legal framework of business organization in England from the sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth is examined by reference to the specific contexts that shaped it and to the implications of its particular configuration for business activity and performance. Ron Harris takes nothing for granted. Neither the emergence of the joint-stock corporation as the predominant type of business organization in the modern industrialized world nor its peculiar characteristics were foregone conclusions. Both were the product of historical contingency during more than four centuries, and Harris is careful to specify who and what played major roles, and why. Harris demonstrates that the joint-stock corporation had its roots in the long-distance trading companies and state financial innovations of the seventeenth century, and for two hundred years it was hobbled by its mercantilist origins. His plausible reinterpretation of the Bubble Act (1720) minimizes its supposed influence on the shaping of business organization and necessitates a more complex explanation. The transport and insurance sectors pioneered divergent forms of joint-stock enterprise through the eighteenth century, the former via parliamentary incorporation (and the reassurance of limited liability), the latter via the heterodoxy of unincorporated companies. “The two sectors underwent an intriguing experimental and evolutionary process of learning by doing and by copying” (p. 107). Including variant forms, such as the part-ownership of ships and cost-book partnerships in mining, Harris calculates that by 1810 joint-stocks provided a substantial proportion of English capital investment, and “jointstock undertakings were almost everywhere in the English economy, except agriculture” (p. 196). This, however—despite his careful delineations—is still to risk exaggerating their importance in the manufacturing sector. Again one is forced to recognize that industrialization occurred first in England despite, not because of, some of its institutions. It was only in the wake of the industrial revolution (circa 1760–1830) that much important legal reform was enacted: before the mid-nineteenth century the law of patents, insolvency, and bankruptcy did little to encourage risk-taking behavior. The law regulating business organizations was no exception. English industrialists, inventors, and entrepreneurs in general had to muddle through. Harris shows how a deep-rooted distrust of monopoly, closely associated in folk memory (even Adam Smith’s!) with shareholding in B O O K R E V I E W S

Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660-1800

List of tables and figures Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Notes on style Introduction 1. Patents 1550-1660: law, policy and controversy 2. The later-Stuart patent grant - an instrument of policy? 3. The development of the patent system, 1660-1800 4. The judiciary and the enforcement of patent rights 5. The decision to patent 6. Invention outside the patent system 7. Patents in a capitalist economy 8. The long-term rise in patents 9. The goals of invention 10. Patents: criticisms and alternatives 11. A new concept of invention Notes Bibliography Index.