The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  This blinkered view didn’t change the need for steam engines to deliver more power, of course; water needed to be pumped from ever deeper mine shafts, factories needed more power to drive larger wheels. The response of Boulton & Watt was Archimedean: longer levers driven by ever larger condensing engines, using cylinders up to five feet in diameter, with strokes of nine or even ten feet. That these behemoths offered a pretty unattractive power-to-weight ratio didn’t seem at the time to be much of a problem; low pressure—about 8 to 10 psi—was reliable, safe, and affordable. A multi-ton condensing steam engine could pull a bucket from a mine shaft five hundred feet deep, or run a dozen shafts at a cotton spinning factory. But it couldn’t pull itself any distance at all.

  It wasn’t that no one thought about the possibility of steam locomotion. In 1784, only four months after Poldory, Watt himself described, in the same patent that included the parallel linkage, a piston-driven steam carriage that used “the elastic force of steam5 to give motion.” In 1785, Boulton & Watt’s brilliant engineer William Murdock actually built a “steam carriage” and for the first time filed a patent in his own name. He even built a scale model of his carriage—a cylinder with a diameter of three-quarters of an inch and a stroke of an inch and a half—and decided to exhibit it in London, though there is no reason to believe that it would have been a success. Asking a steam engine to move itself—to say nothing of cargo or passengers—meant making it powerful and lightweight; and the only way to do that was increasing the pressure in the cylinder. With his fortune tied to the future of low-pressure steam power, Matthew Boulton himself intercepted Murdock6 on the way to London and persuaded him to return to building stationary Boulton & Watt engines in Cornwall.

  Which was where, in any case, the next revolution in steam engines was going to occur. There, and in America.

  BY THE MIDDLE OF August 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the world’s first, and most consequential, Constitutional Convention had been meeting in Philadelphia for three months of an extremely hot summer. They had debated judicial appointments, executive departments, and every conceivable duty of a national legislature. They had established the line of command for the new nation’s armed forces and proposed a national postal service. Given all that, it’s no great shock that the first acknowledgment that the newly proposed federal government had any place in protecting the activities of inventors didn’t come until August 18, when James Madison of Virginia proposed that the national legislature be empowered to “encourage knowledge and discoveries.” The same day, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina submitted a proposal that the government be able “to grant patents for useful inventions.”7

  Four days later, on the twenty-second, the convention adjourned for the afternoon and headed to the banks of the Delaware River to see a demonstration of the power of such useful invention: a forty-five-foot-long boat that resembled an Iroquois war canoe, with six oars on either side. The motive force for those oars, however, was not muscle. It was steam.

  The steamboat’s inventor, a onetime clockmaker and silversmith from Connecticut named John Fitch, had turned a traditional twelve-inch condensing cylinder on its side and used it to drive a piston with a three-foot stroke tied to an eighteen-inch axle. In his own words, “Each revolution of the axle tree8 moves twelve oars five and a half feet. As six oars come out of the water six more enter the water; which makes a stroke of about eleven feet each revolution. The oars work perpendicularly and make a stroke similar to the paddle of a canoe.”

  Fitch’s steamboat was not, as many histories have it, the world’s first. In 1772, two ex–artillery officers in the French army, the Comte d’Auxiron and Charles Monnin de Follenai, received a fifteen-year exclusive license to run a steamboat along the Seine. Unfortunately, their first attempt, a marriage of a Newcomen engine to a Seine bâteau, was less than successful: the engine was so heavy it sank the boat. Slightly more successfully, in 1783, the Marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans took a 140-foot boat mounting a Newcomen-style engine out on the Saône from Lyon. He did make it all the way back to the dock, where cheering crowds met it—just in time, before the engine’s vibrations destroyed the boat.*

  The great importance of Fitch’s steamboat was not that it survived its inaugural trip; it was his audience, who were properly impressed with what turned out to be the steamboat’s maiden voyage. One delegate, William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, wrote on the twenty-third, “the exhibition yesterday9 gave the gentlemen present much satisfaction and will always be happy to give him every countenance and encouragement in their power which his ingenuity and industry entitles him to.” Two weeks later, the Brearly Committee (named for its chairman, David Brearly of New Jersey, and also, and unfortunately, known as the “Committee of Leftovers”) reported on fourteen proposals to the convention; the last one was a recommendation to “provide limited patents10 to promote science and arts.” The patent clause was incorporated, without a single dissenting vote, into Article I, Section 8, paragraph 8 of the United States Constitution.

  It’s easy to see why the American revolutionaries were so taken with the British attitude toward intellectual property. In almost every relevant way, they were British. The common law was as well known on the banks of the Potomac as along the Thames. Virginians signed on to seven-year apprenticeships as carpenters, millwrights, and glaziers exactly as their counterparts did in Yorkshire (sometimes an apprenticeship would begin in the latter and conclude in the former). The éminence grise of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, was not only a Fellow of the Royal Society but also one of the most prolific inventors of the entire eighteenth century; Thomas Jefferson, the revolution’s intellectual soul, took enough time off from his writing and architecture to design revolving bookstands, copying machines, revolving chairs, and even a new and improved moldboard plow. If those models weren’t sufficient, eighteenth-century America showed even more enthusiasm than Britain itself for the intellectual forebears of patent law. Locke was considerably more influential among the American constitutionalists than he ever was to English parliamentarians, and had even drafted the first constitution for the Carolina colony. And not just Locke: the Mayflower had carried a set of Coke’s writings from the Old World to the New, and both Jefferson and Madison had gotten their legal training from reading them. In the eighty-fourth of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton compared Coke’s 1628 Petition of Right to the Magna Carta.

  Fitch’s influence on the future of steamboats was less enduring.* He gave up on oars fairly quickly and experimented with circular paddles and even an early propeller screw, which he used for ferry service between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey, but his failures outnumbered his successes many times over. Though he pursued a national patent, and de facto monopoly, on steam-powered water travel with monomaniacal zeal for years (much of his time exhausted in disputes over priority with another inventor, James Rumsey, who used a jet of water propelled by a steam-driven pump to drive a boat on the Potomac in 1787), the final award of patent, almost three years to the day after his demonstration for the delegates in Philadelphia, was so limited in its language as to be commercially useless.

  The fact that a national patent was available at all, however, was the significant thing. One reason that those constitutionalists were even in Philadelphia that summer was the realization that the union originally established in 1777 under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was responsible for governing a nation that covered a territory bigger than France, Britain, Germany, and Spain combined, with fewer tools than a New England town meeting. The confederation—unable to tax its citizenry or even levy soldiers in wartime, powers that were reserved to the individual states—wasn’t deriving much benefit from its size.

  And while national defense was obviously a more urgent deficiency, economic issues were a close second, including the recognition that some national authority needed to promote, and protect, invention. In 1800, there were only a few more Americans living in the New World
than Dutch living in the old, and we’ve already seen that the Netherlands, despite its great wealth, was still too small to support British-style inventing; Massachusetts, or Virginia, wouldn’t stand a chance. Inadvertently, the constitution had stumbled on the fundamental issue of scale in intellectual property. The value of a bar of gold or a bushel of wheat—Romer’s rivalrous property—is no greater in a large country than a small one. On the other hand, the value of a nonrivalrous patent or copyright increases in direct proportion to the number of people one can sue to prevent its theft.

  Not everyone agreed, even in eighteenth-century America. Thomas Jefferson, most notably, was reflexively offended by even the slightest odor of monopoly; in a much-quoted letter sent to his friend Isaac McPherson, Jefferson wrote:

  If nature has made any one thing11 less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me…. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

  Nonrivalrous property indeed; small wonder that Jefferson is regarded as the intellectual godfather of the twenty-first century’s “information wants to be free” movement. Partly because of his resistance, the First Congress, which opened for business in March 1789, failed to consider a system for granting patents for nearly a year. The first American patent statute was, however, eventually passed, and was signed by George Washington on April 10, becoming the law of the land—or of twelve-thirteenths of the land, since Rhode Island hadn’t yet ratified the Constitution.

  The original procedure was fairly straightforward. Each patent application was sent to a committee of the United States Senate, who then referred it to the attorney general, who passed it to the president, who signed it and returned it to the secretary of state (in 1790, Thomas Jefferson). That was changed soon enough to the newly named Commissioners for the Promotion of Useful Arts: Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph.

  The American system was simplicity itself compared to the contemporaneous British system, which was a thing of cartoonish complexity:

  Step 1: Inventor prepares petition to the Crown, including an affidavit sworn before a “Master of Chancery”

  Step 2: Master sends petition plus accompanying affidavit to the Home Office, who reads, endorses, and sends to the Attorney General and Solicitor General

  Step 3: The Attorney General and Solicitor General review and, if they approve, return both petition and report to the Home Office

  Step 4: Home Office prepares a warrant; sends to the King

  Step 5: King signs, and Secretary of State countersigns, the warrant

  Step 6: Secretary of State sends warrant back to Attorney General and Solicitor General; they prepare a bill describing the invention, and transcribe it onto the actual letters patent (written on parchment, in order to have the force of law)

  Step 7: Attorney General and Solicitor General send parchment bill back to Secretary of State; King and Secretary again sign and countersign, thus making it, literally, a “King’s Bill”

  Step 8: Secretary of State sends the King’s Bill to the Signet Office, which prepares an identical version, known as the “Signet Bill” (on parchment, of course; see Step 6)

  Step 9: Signet Office sends Signet Bill to the Lord Privy Seal, who prepares a Writ of Privy Seal—yes, on parchment—and sends it to the Lord Chancellor with Signet Bill and Letters Patent

  Step 10: Lord Chancellor “engrosses” Letters Patent on parchment with language identical to the Writ, dates it, and finally seals it

  The system was not only absurdly complicated but outrageously expensive. In 1792, the official cost of a patent12 was £70 for England and Wales, but “gratuities” to every secretary, official, and even doorman standing along the way typically ran another £20; the tariff including Scotland and Ireland could easily exceed £300. The cost of a U.S. patent application,13 by comparison, was fifty cents; if the patent was awarded, the recipient owed the federal government two dollars, plus another dollar for affixing the Great Seal of the United States.

  Even so, the American system was a little slow getting started. The United States issued only three patents during all of 1790. The first went to Samuel Hopkins for his method of making potash; the second, “for manufacturing candles,” was granted to a Boston chandler named Joseph Stacey Sampson. Both patents ended up generating far more wealth as rare documents, sold and resold to collectors avid for the signatures of Jefferson and Washington, than they ever did for their inventors. By number three, however, the system had identified an inventor who would do as much as any man alive to put steam on the move: a Philadelphian named Oliver Evans.

  EVANS WAS BORN IN 1755 in the colony of Delaware and was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to a wheelwright in Pennsylvania. By the end of the customary seven years of training and toil, he had already built his first invention, a machine tool for making the leather “cards” used for removing unwanted material from wool and cotton. One of Evans’s most distinctive skills was the ability to see machines as a series of related steps, and his tool was an early, but telling, case in point: an assembly line in a box, it first bent the wire, then cut it to the proper length, and finally punched holes in precut pieces of leather, on which it mounted up to one thousand wire teeth per minute, with all the steps driven by a single rotating wheel. The hand-cranked card-making machine, for which Evans sought and received patent protection in Delaware, was an immediate success; so successful, in fact, that copies of it turned up, within months—and royalty-free—in Massachusetts, an early reminder to the inventor of the problematic character of intellectual property.

  Evans’s next invention took the process of using one mechanical motion to drive a succeeding one a giant step further. Starting in 1788, he designed and built an automated mill that turned wheat into flour in a single continuous operation, illustrating, on a much larger scale, his gift for sequential mechanics. This time an elevator—actually wooden cups affixed to belts—lifted the unmilled grains of wheat onto a conveyor belt, which, in turn, was driven by a rod with lands cut into it: effectively a horizontal screw. The belt then pushed the wheat through the millstones into a hopper where a mechanical rake alternately stirred and sifted the flour. And once again a single rotating shaft synchronized all the operations.

  Of all the components of the mill, only the hopper was truly original; but the real novelty, and value, of the invention came from the way it coordinated several existing mechanisms. Evans had once again exhibited a gift for seeing the big picture, literally, if uncomfortably: “I have in my bed viewed the whole operation14 with much mental anxiety.” In the event, it was the “whole operation” rather than any specific machine that earned Evans his first patents: first a fourteen-year grant in Maryland and Pennsylvania, a little later one of the same duration in Delaware, and one in New Hampshire to run for seven years.

  His receipt of U.S. patent number 3 in 1790 generated prominent clients, and equally prominent critics. Though George Washington installed an Evans machine at his Dogue Run mill in 1791, his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson was nonplussed by Evans’s claim of novelty: “If the bringing together under the same roof15 various useful things before known entitled him [Evans] to an exclusive use of all these … every utensil of life might be taken for use by a patent…. I can conceive how a machine may improve the manufacturing of flour, but not how a principle abstracted from any machine can do it.”

  Whatever Jefferson’s concerns about patents in general, and Evans’s in particular, he discharged his responsibility for them with
diligence, and eventually—once he conceded the success of the law in promoting invention—enthusiasm. Evans himself was certainly spurred by the financial incentives of patent ownership, though their promise, in his case, frequently overran their actuality. His goal had been to earn his living16 selling licenses to other millers, but he found them resistant to automation, and in a classic pattern he spent more in legal fees suing patent infringers than he earned in licenses, despite renewing his patents nationally in 1808. By then, however, though his grist mills typically ran on waterpower, he was fully entangled in the next stage of the steam engine revolution.

  In his own later recollection, Evans’s interest in using steam power for transportation dated back to his apprenticeship; in 1773, he had noticed a blacksmith’s apprentice using steam as the propellant in a gun. By 1783, he was already attempting to patent a steam locomotive, though his application to the Pennsylvania legislature was rejected for lack of a working model.

  Using steam to propel vehicles over land was considerably more difficult than doing so on water, for reasons of simple physics. A wheeled vehicle needs to combat both gravity and inertia, plus any number of sources of friction, particularly the wheel against the axle rod. By contrast, relatively little power is needed to propel a lot of weight on water, primarily because of the lack of any real changes in elevation, close to perfectly even terrain, and negligible friction; this is why shipping large amounts of freight has always been cheaper by water than by land. As a result, a separate condensing engine could drive John Fitch’s steamboat. With the water supporting the engine’s weight, enough power could be produced to drive the craft, though slowly: four miles an hour, a brisk walking pace.

  Locomotive engines, however, needed to put out more power with less weight; to be, in short, efficient. One of Evans’s great Usherian insights was that if one could dramatically increase the temperature of the steam, and therefore its pressure, the separate condenser could be dispensed with, at a huge weight savings. Another was that even though the steam, without a condenser, would simply disappear into the air once it had driven the piston, it would still use less fuel than was used up constantly reheating and recondensing. All he had to do was discover a way to increase the heat and pressure in the cylinder by an order of magnitude—but without turning it into a steam-powered hand grenade.