THE HOPES OF INVENTORS.
WE pointed out the other day that the system of Competitive Examination, whatever its merits or defects, was protected by the resolution of Paterfamilias, who governs this kingdom in the last resort, to keep his patronage in his own hands ; and we suspect that a law securing inventors some property in their ideas is protected as perfectly and in much the same way. Parliament may alter the Patent Laws, Lord Granville may laugh at property in ideas, Lord Cairns may doubt whether manufacturers can go on if inventors are encouraged to levy blackmail, and Lord Selborne may argue that patents are simply nuisances ; but the rights of in- ventors, for all that, are in little serious danger. They are essential to British day-dreams, and they will not be given up. Englishmen, who are supposed on the Continent, in spite of their literature, and their religion, and their history, to be an unimaginative race, are nevertheless very much given to clay-dreaming, and among their day-dreams the possibility of getting rich quickly by honest means occupies a very conspicuous place. They do not, it is true, dream much of wealth acquired in impossible ways, of three wishes granted by fairies, of Fortunatus's purse, or of colossal legacies from people who never heard their names. A few among them, if men ever revealed weaknesses of that sort, might allow that they indulged themselves—as Sir James Mackintosh is said to have done throughout his life—in visions quite as unsub- stantial as those of fairy-land ; but as a rule our countrymen, when they dream by day, limit their dreams by rules,—by the possible, by the non-miraculous, and even by the legal. They are to get rich by something they do, in a way that is respectable, and to an amount not quite beyond the bounds of credibility. They are Alnaschars under the coercion of the usual. They cannot get over their mental habits, and they think out restrictions as fully as the splendours which those restric- tions are to limit. Sir James Mackintosh, in all his dreams of what he would do as Emperor of Constantinople—dreams which lasted years—never forgot the geography of his capital ;
and Englishmen, if they told the truth, would say that, even when day-dreaming of riches and what they would do with them, they always limit the sum to a fortune known to exist or to be possible ; that they never imagine extravagant interest for the capital, or miraculous renewal of the expended portion ; that they are annoyed at Monte Christo's expenditure because it was in excess of his means; and that Edgar Poe's dream of the domain of Arnheim is spoiled to them by the millions its realisation would demand. No mode of obtaining wealth realises the conditions of English day- dreaming quite so perfectly as a profitable invention—for one has ideas, if one has not a mine—and no one is from circumstances so frequently present to the English mind. Very few people make money by patents, and those few are seldom inventors, the men with money for whom Lord Granville is so anxious plundering the men with ideas almost as they like ; but still two or three persons have made out of ideas fortunes of the first class, and the stories of their poverty, of their " hits," and of their wealth, have sunk deeply into the popular mind. There is not a man in the country With a mechanical turn who has not heard of the barber Arkwright, who does not think of his invention as something quite within his own powers, and who does not hope with that vague hope which is not expectation and yet is pleasurable, to die as rich as Arkwright's son. The impression made by that single instance is almost inconceivable, as was also the effect of the vote of £5,000 to the man who made postage-stamps possible by in- venting a machine for perforating the paper between the stamps. " What ! £5,000 for that thing ? Why, I could do better than that myself." And he begins thinking what he could do that the world wants to have done ; tries, if he is scientific, to regulate an electric light ; or if he is practical, to make a new amalgam for type that shall not wear out ; or if he is viewy, to discover some mode of mul- tiplying movement without multiplying motive-power. There is not, we believe, a First Lord or Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary to the Treasury who will not bear us out in saying that the desire to submit petty inventions to the Treasury, and get £5,000 for them, is a direct aggravation to the miseries of their lives ; or who will not think that a single case seemed for some time to have increased the amount of dangerous ituracy in England. It had not, of course, but it had given a direction to lunatic minds, and there are at this moment scores of lunatics walking about who believe firmly that if they could only exhibit their inventions to Parliament they should be lapped in ease and comfort for the rest of their lives. Besides these well-known instances, there are thousands of others less known, but in smaller areas quite as influential. Almost every man knows in his own circle somebody who has made money by a patent, probably the outcome of years of unrequited hard labour, and if he will inquire among that patentee's friends he will be told that the lucky man had by accident an idea, and worked it out in a sleepless night, and "so you see all at once_ became a millionaire." His invention, in truth, had cost him years, had involved three law-suits and a bankruptcy, and had brought fifty thousand pounds at last ; but the day-dreaming habit is aroused by the ultimate success, the facts are too prosaic, and the only version of the story which can find acceptance is the one most like a legend from the " Arabian Nights." The dreamer may be poor, he may be lazy, he may be uninventive, and he may know all those facts about himself ; but why should stupidity, or lazi- ness, or poverty stop him? He may hit on an idea, and then—then there will be gold for the asking. Obstacles have no meaning, results no difficulty, facts no proportion to a dreamer of that kind. A machine maker told us once that he was asked £30,000 for an " idea," the meaning of which was that a boiler would generate more steam if placed in a different relation to the engine, and that the discoverer, otherwise a very sensible man, could not be convinced that, even granting his theory, the loss of space would be greater than the saving. Any owner of great " Works " will testify to the prevalence of such delusions, as well as to the extraordinary number of persons who devote years to inventions, sometimes of value, sometimes useless, but usually triffing, and always in the inventors' mind worth the consideration of nations and very large sums of money. Such are but the extreme examples of a latent tendency universally diffused, and as strong in its hold upon the mind as a religion. A Patent has become to the average Englishman a Pactolus. We do not hesitate to say that if the right of property in ideas could be abrogated to- morrow, a perceptible section of the adult population would feel as if they had lost a chance in life, as if a career had been closed up before them, as if a relative had died, and they had been cheated out of the legacy she had be-
queathed. The Yankee, when he wants to describe his countrymen's specialty, draws a cradle on rockers and a mother rocking it, and a baby in it of a month old, who remarks, " When I'm three I'll make that machine self-acting, and won't the mothers pay!" And the Englishman, though he does not invent like a Yankee—taking out only 4,000 patents to 17,000—has just as strong a desire to do it. Tell him that even if he gets an idea he is not to sell it, and he will consider himself a man "put apon ;" and though he cannot punish Lord Cairns, he can and will make things very unpleasant for his own Member. The right of selling an invention is to him a reserved power, a possibility which may lift him from darkness into light, a chance which, if it occurred, would fulfil his dreams at once, without toil or wait- ing or subservience ; and because of his unimaginativeness, because of his insensibility to the pleasures of life, because of the sordidness of his surroundings, he will not let the bright ray go.
There is a belief current in some quarters, and apparently entertained by Lord Granville, that invention as a pursuit is to a great extent its own reward ; that the inventive will in- vent as poets write, whether they are inspirited by the Lope of cash or not. That may be true in some infrequent instances where the inventor thinks his invention will give him fame, as Daguerre thought ; or will benefit the human race, as Sir James Simpson thought ; or will complete creative work, as ?allay, the potter, thought ; but in the majority of instances the inventor is a day-dreamer, and the hope of wealth, large and easily obtained, his strongest stimulus. This is shown not only by the infrequency of invention before property in ideas was recognised, and the astounding amount of time, energy, and 'creative power lavished upon the search for the Philosopher's Stone—a search stimulated only by the desire for riches—but by the secretiveness and angry jealousy of being robbed, which marks with few exceptions the whole tribe of inventors. They are not artists delighting in their own creative power, careless of watchful eyes, or rather exulting in them, impelled to work by some inner necessity, but seekers for gold, jealous of pursuers, and anxious first of all to conceal the traces of their methods. They will trust no one they can help, address capitalists with the air of conspirators, and if they are cheated, fight with a venom and tenacity natural to men in whom golden hopes have been followed by disappointment. Everything is given gratis occasionally, except a secret on which a patent could be built. Such men regard the law giving them property in their ideas not only as a protection but as an indispensable one ; and failing it, would either cease to invent, or inventing, would do all in their power to keep inventions secret.
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