143Markets and consumer cultures English-speakers in the Transvaal to bolster their opposition, only to be rebuffed by the mining magnates and the government. The mining magnates seemed interested only in mechanising their industry, increasing productivity and reducing reliance on black labour. The government, meanwhile, insisted that the Transvaal’s economy was benefiting greatly from increased supplies of cheap electricity, so that there was no need to put contracts for machinery out to open tender. In this instance, at least, the ‘buy-British’ argument had little purchase in business or official circles. In 1911, the Victoria Falls Power Company’s new Vereeniging station came into operation. Sammy Marks likened it to a ‘South African Sheffield on the Rand’. In truth, it would have been better likened to Berlin – the industrial heartland of AEG.
Patents systems Technological convergence was not restricted to the railway and mining sectors; nor was it the product of professional mobility alone. The emergence of colonial patent systems and professional patent agencies had an integral role to play.81 In most countries there was a long tradition of granting patents; Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and other nationals were all well accustomed to their use. The evolution of affordable and enforceable patent protection was in fact central to the development of a modern market for technological ideas. Patents worked because they offered a sensible compromise between the competing interests of the owners of the new technology, who wished to protect their intellectual property by controlling its use, and society at large, whose interests were obviously best served by the widespread adoption of new, more efficient technology. Both parties could clearly benefit, and once this was realised and the systems issuing them trusted, there was a strong incentive to extend the arrangement to as many jurisdictions as possible. Successful invent ors, such as Thomas Edison (1847–1931), therefore took the patenting of their inventions in non-American patents systems, including colonial ones, very much as a matter of course.82 Reflecting this willingness to patent across national boundaries was the fact that patent offices and agents in every system worked to establish
81 The section draws from G. B. Magee, Knowledge Generation: Technological Change and
Economic Growth in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing,
2000), esp. pp. 138–80, 208–14. Unless otherwise stated, this is the source of the mater-
ial cited.
82 P. Israel and R. Rosenberg, ‘Patent Office Records as a Historical Source: The Case of
Thomas Edison’, Technology and Culture 32 (1991), pp. 1094–101; Magee, Knowledge
Generation, p. 83.
144contacts and to exchange relevant information and publications with their counterparts elsewhere. As a result, by the latter half of the nineteenth century British and Colonial Patent Offices held vast libraries containing reports and specifications of the patents that had been issued in various parts of the world. The richest information in their collections, however, inevitably related to colonial and British patenting. Moreover, from 1864 the British Commissioner of Patents’ Journal published and circulated booklets, which furnished information on how prospective patentees could protect their inventions in each of the settler colonies.
Patent agents also contributed to this pro-colonial informational asymmetry. By selling their specialist knowledge on the acquisition and management of patent protection, they were crucially placed to influence the dissemination of information and technological knowledge. So important had their role become in the patent system that, as early as 1851, the progress of approximately 90 per cent of all patent applications in Britain was directed by a patent agent. In the colonies, too, patent agents quickly became important to the running of the local patent systems.83
In Australia, for example, the first practising patent agent appears to have been William Henry Ritchie, who began operating out of an office in Melbourne from about 1857. He was soon followed by others, many of whom had prior experience as lawyers, engineers or even patent agents back in Britain. The profession actively sought to preserve these ties to Britain, and it was not uncommon for patent agents from the colonies to visit and interact with like-minded colleagues in London. The Melbourne-based patent agent Edward Waters, for example, visited and presented a paper on Australasian patents to the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents in London in 1885, an interest in Australia and the empire that the organ of the British Institute followed up subsequently with articles on patenting law and practice in the colonies. These visits and various exchanges of information appeared to have had the desired effect. A manual compiled by two leading British patent agents in 1905 listed the relatively small Australian system among the twenty or so in which it was worthwhile for inventors to seek patent protection.84 Australia, like the other dominions, was therefore clearly part of an international patenting network, albeit one centred in London. The footprint of Australia’s imperial status is clearly evident in the records of the Colony of Victoria’s patent system. Established in 1857, the Victorian system was without doubt the largest, the most modern
83 H. I. Dutton, The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution,
1750–1852 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 86–96.
84 E. Edwards and A. E. Edwards, How to Take Out Patents in England and Abroad (Edwards
and Co., 1905).
145Markets and consumer cultures and the most effective in pre-Federation Australia.85 It was popular with local and overseas inventors alike. Not only did non-Australians, predominantly Americans and Britons, manage to lodge approximately a third of all applicants between 1857 and 1903 (when the Victorian system was superseded by that of the Australian Commonwealth), their patents related to all areas of the economy, not just the primary and mining sector. Indeed, the strengths of their patenting overwhelmingly lay in the manufacturing and service sectors. That said, it can hardly be claimed that the Victorian system was a truly level playing field for most international inventors. Given its grounding in British patent law, the Victorian Patent Office practices and procedures were bound to be more familiar – and hence accessible – to British inventors and their agents. Thus, British World connections – personal, professional and official – made the typical British inventor more aware of Australia than foreign counterparts. This is why in most years British patent applications there outnumbered even American ones, despite the amazing scale of American inventive activity that was taking place at this time.
Chambers of Commerce If trans-national history is conceived as ‘the study of the ways in which past lives and events have been shaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of nation states’,86 then business networks should be seen as a primary manifestation of it. As one scholar observes, ‘businessmen in regional industries in different countries sometimes had more in common with each other, through the mutually dependent demands of a shared trade, than they had with their fellow citizens oper-