A fundamental reassessment of the contribution of patenting to British industrialisation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This book, first published in 2005, examines the evolution and impact of American intellectual property rights during the 'long nineteenth century'.

An engagingly written account of textile engineering in its key northern centres, rich with historical narrative and analysis. The engineers who built the first generations of modern textile machines, between 1770 and 1850, pushed at the boundaries of possibility. This book investigates these pioneering machine-makers, almost all working within textile communities in northern England, and the industry they created. It probes their origins and skills, the sources of their inspiration and impetus, and how it was possible to develop a high-tech, factory-centred, world-leading marketin textile machinery virtually from scratch. The story of textile engineering defies classical assumptions about the driving forces behind the Industrial Revolution. The circumstances of its birth, and the personal affiliationsat work during periods of exceptional creativity, suggest that the potential to accelerate economic growth could be found within social assets and craft skills. Appreciating textile engineering within its own time and context challenges views inherited from Victorian thinkers, who tended to ascribe to it features of the fully fledged industry they saw before them. The Age of Machinery is an engagingly written account of the trade in its key northern centres, devoid of jargon and yet tightly argued, equally rich with historical narrative and analysis. It will be invaluable not only to students and scholars of British economic history and the Industrial Revolution but also tosocial scientists looking at human agency and its contribution to economic growth and innovation. GILLIAN COOKSON holds a DPhil in economic history and has been employed since 1995 in academic research and consultancy, including as county editor, Victoria County History of Durham.

At head of title: 85th Cong., 2d sess. Committee print. Bibliography: p. 81-86.

This volume offers a detailed account of the development of national patent systems, and then moving on to the international sphere to discuss the factors which provided the impetus for the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883).

This volume offers contributions to questions relating to the economics of innovation and technological change. Central to the development of new technologies are institutional environments and among the topics discussed are the roles played by universities and the ways in which the allocation of funds affects innovation.

How did pre-industrial London build the biggest water supply industry on earth? Beginning in 1580, a number of competing London companies sold water directly to consumers through a large network of wooden mains in the expanding metropolis. This new water industry flourished throughout the 1600s, eventually expanding to serve tens of thousands of homes. By the late eighteenth century, more than 80 percent of the city’s houses had water connections—making London the best-served metropolis in the world while demonstrating that it was legally, commercially, and technologically possible to run an infrastructure network within the largest city on earth. In this richly detailed book, historian Leslie Tomory shows how new technologies imported from the Continent, including waterwheel-driven piston pumps, spurred the rapid growth of London’s water industry. The business was further sustained by an explosion in consumer demand, particularly in the city’s wealthy West End. Meanwhile, several key local innovations reshaped the industry by enlarging the size of the supply network. By 1800, the success of London’s water industry made it a model for other cities in Europe and beyond as they began to build their own water networks. The city’s water infrastructure even inspired builders of other large-scale urban projects, including gas and sewage supply networks. The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820 explores the technological, cultural, and mercantile factors that created and sustained this remarkable industry. Tomory examines how the joint-stock form became popular with water companies, providing a stable legal structure that allowed for expansion. He also explains how the roots of the London water industry’s divergence from the Continent and even from other British cities was rooted both in the size of London as a market and in the late seventeenth-century consumer revolution. This fascinating and unique study of essential utilities in the early modern period will interest business historians and historians of science and technology alike.