| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

B. Zorina Khan. The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920. (NBER Series on Long-term Factors in Economic Development, A National Bureau of Economic Research Series.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 322. $60.00.
In this book, B. Zorina Khan contrasts the patent and copyright policies of the United States with those of Britain and France during the (very) long nineteenth century. She finds that the American patent system was democratic in the sense that it was more open and merit-based than those of Europe, the high fees and class biases of which limited access to an elite few. Most Americans never received a patent, but in most years between 1790 and 1920 Americans patented more inventions per capita than the British or French did. From about ten per million people per year in the 1790s, American patent rates rose to over 400 per million people per year in the 1910s.	1
In America, "great inventors" did not dominate or even predominate. Fewer than five percent of patentees received ten or more patents over their careers; over fifty percent received only one patent in their entire lives. Patentees hailed from every walk of life, including commercial and professional occupations, the engineering and mechanical trades, and artisanal and manufacturing pursuits. Women and free blacks obtained patents, and their activity increased after the Civil War, although at the same time patentees became increasingly college educated and corporation connected. Nevertheless, the U.S. patent system remained market-based and efficient. Patents were granted on the basis of worldwide novelty and not some bureaucrat's sense of their intellectual or economic merit. They were also alienable and regularly sold to the highest bidder. As Abraham Lincoln pronounced, "the patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius" (p. 182).	. . .

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