NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES

PATENTS AND INNOVATION IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

Petra Moser

Working Paper 21964

http://www.nber.org/papers/w21964

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

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February 2016

Prepared for the Annual Review of Economics. I wish to thank the editor Tim Bresnahan, as well
as Eric Hilt, Larry White, Megan MacGarvie, and Walker Hanlon for helpful comments and discussions.
Much of the research that I describe in this review has been supported by the National Science Foundation
through CAREER Grant 1151180, and through a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study (CASBS).
The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National
Bureau of Economic Research.

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-
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© 2016 by Petra Moser. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may
be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.
Patents and Innovation in Economic History
Petra Moser
NBER Working Paper No. 21964
February 2016
JEL No. K0,K21,L51,N0,O30,O31,O34

ABSTRACT

A strong tradition in economic history, which primarily relies on qualitative evidence and statistical
correlations, has emphasized the importance of patents as a primary driver of innovation. Recent improvements
in empirical methodology – through the creation of new data sets and advances in identification –
have produced research that challenges this traditional view. The findings of this literature provide
a more nuanced view of the effects of intellectual property, and suggest that when patent rights have
been too broad or strong, they have actually discouraged innovation. This paper summarizes the major
results from this research and presents open questions.

Petra Moser
Department of Economics
NYU Stern
44 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012
and NBER
[email protected]
 PETRA MOSER

PATENTS AND INNOVATION IN ECONOMIC HISTORY1

Abstract:
A strong tradition in economic history, which primarily relies on qualitative evidence and
statistical correlations, has emphasized the importance of patents as a primary driver of
innovation. Recent improvements in empirical methodology – through the creation of new data
sets and advances in identification – have produced research that challenges this traditional view.
The findings of this literature provide a more nuanced view of the effects of intellectual property,
and suggest that when patent rights have been too broad or strong, they have actually
discouraged innovation. This paper summarizes the major results from this research and presents
open questions.

Keywords: Technical change, intellectual property, patents, science, creativity.

JEL Codes: O3, O34, N0, L51, K00

Innovation is commonly viewed as the primary driver of sustained improvements in

human welfare and economic growth. The creation of intellectual property institutions,

particularly patents, has been motivated by a desire to stimulate innovation, and support

economic growth. Yet the connections between patents and innovation are difficult to identify

empirically, and the predictions of economic theory are somewhat ambiguous. For example,

basic models of patent laws (in the spirit of Nordhaus 1969) predict that extensions in the length

of patents encourage innovation by granting inventors stronger property rights in their ideas. Yet

alternative models suggest that stronger patents can discourage innovation if they reduce the

payoffs to later innovators who rely on previous inventions as an input for their work (e.g.,

Scotchmer 1991, Bessen and Maskin 2007).

1
Prepared for the Annual Review of Economics. I wish to thank the editor Tim Bresnahan, as well as Eric Hilt,
Larry White, Megan MacGarvie, and Walker Hanlon for helpful comments and conversations. Much of the research
that I describe in this review has been supported by the National Science Foundation through CAREER Grant
1151180, and through a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study (CASBS).
 Economic history plays an important role in research on patent policies because it

provides some of the best data, as well as credibly exogenous sources of policy variation. In the

nineteenth century, for example, several countries failed to adopt patent systems for significant

periods of time, or abolished existing patent laws for political reasons that were unrelated to

innovation. In addition, the world technology fairs of the nineteenth century (Moser 2005, 2011,

and 2012) create opportunities to examine innovations that were made within and outside of

patent systems across countries. The catalogs of these exhibitions enable researchers to observe

the rate and direction of technical change in countries without patents, as well as the rate at

which innovators use patents when they are available. Both are critical for understanding the

effects of patents laws on innovation, and represents a major advantage over much of the

literature on modern innovation, which relies primarily on patent data.

The lens of history also allows researchers to examine changes in policy from a distance,

which often leads to a more complete understanding of different aspects of intellectual property

institutions. This is particularly useful because the design of a well-functioning patent system

depends on understanding the tradeoffs associated with many different components of patent

policy, including some that are exceedingly difficult to analyze with modern data. For example, a

key issue in international debates relates to compulsory licensing, which allows developing

countries to license foreign-owned patents to domestic firms - without the consent of foreign

patent owners. To devise effective policies to govern compulsory licensing, policy makers must

weigh the benefits of compulsory licensing for consumers and firms in developing countries

against the potential costs of reducing innovation incentives for foreign firms whose intellectual

property rights are violated.

1
 Another example of such tradeoffs are patent pools, which allow competing firms to

combine their patents and license them as a bundle to outside non-member firms. Regulators

who decide whether or not to allow these arrangements must evaluate the benefits that pools

provide for their members against the potentially negative and dynamic effects of pools on future

innovation. Pools benefit members and consumers by minimizing litigation risks and facilitating

the commercializations of inventions for which competing firms own mutually overlapping

patent rights. Yet they may also discourage the creation of new technologies by allowing pool

members to cooperate (instead of competing to improve). Moreover, the existence of a pool may

increase litigation risks for outside firms, which makes it harder for them to compete with the

pool. These effects have thus far been ignored by theoretical models, but they feature

prominently in historical data.

More generally, analyses of intellectual property institutions must consider alternative

mechanisms, such as secrecy, which inventors can use instead of patents. With a few notable

exceptions (such as Anton and Yao 2004) theories of intellectual property rights have ignored

these alternatives. Yet, their existence allows inventors to opt out of the patent system, which

means that changes in patent policies will not have the predicted effects. In part, economic

analyses have ignored alternative mechanisms, such as secrecy, because they are intrinsically

more difficult to observe. This makes it difficult to evaluate their importance, even though we

know intuitively that they exist. Notably, data from world technology fairs indicate that,

historically, the great majority of innovations have been created outside of the patent systems

(e.g., more than 80 percent of exhibits at the 1851 Crystal Palace).

Intellectual Property Rights as a Source of Economic Development

2
 The origins of intellectual property rights reach back as far as 1474 when the Venetian

Republic begun to offer exclusive rights to entrepreneurs who had invented - or imported – a

new technology. The Venetian law was purposefully agnostic about the source of an innovation;

Venetian rulers were happy to attract skilled artisans with new inventions, whether they had

created that invention or not. Other European countries introduced modified versions of the

Venetian system, hoping to promote economic development. But from the beginning, this system

proved vulnerable to exploitation (David 1994, p. 134). For example, British monarchs up to

King James I used the grant of royal monopolies on technical inventions as a mechanism to

extract rents that financed wars or courtly estates. Britain’s Statute of Monopolies of 1624

replaced the royal monopolies with a system of legal property rights in ideas. North and Thomas

(1973) argue that the creation of this intellectual property institution helped trigger Britain’s

Industrial Revolution. Well-functioning property rights in ideas allow inventors to keep a large

enough share of the fruits of their labor, motivating them to invest in creating socially valuable

inventions.

This ideal motivated the creation of “the world’s first modern patent institution” (e.g.,

Sokoloff and Khan 2001, p. 235), the US patent law. Thus Article 1 of the US Constitution

instructs Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited

Times to Authors and Inventors to the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and

Discoveries.” In contrast with the early British system, the US patent system combined the twin

goals of creating inventions and encouraging their widespread adoption. Importantly, the United

States also introduced a system of patent examinations in 1836 (e.g. Khan 2005, p. 55). This

system charged patent examiners (ideally technical experts in their field) with the responsibility

3
to establish the novelty of each invention and – at least in principle – refuse patents for

inventions covered by previous patents.

European countries began to copy features of the US patent system after they observed

American innovations at the Crystal Palace fair in London in 1851. Until the Great Exhibition of

the Works of Industry of all Nations (as the Crystal Palace was officially called), European

observers had ridiculed the United States as a technological backwater. But soon after the fair

had opened, droves of visitors began to admire US innovations such as the McCormick grain

reaper, which promised enormous productivity gains in agricultural production. Another US

invention, Samuel Colt’s revolver, demonstrated the potential of the American system of

manufacturing, in which the components were made with such uniformity and precision that they

could be treated as interchangeable parts (Hounshell 1985).

Soon afterwards, Britain’s Parliament established a commission to investigate the US

system of manufacturing (Rosenberg 1969, p. 2). In his 1855 report on New York’s own Crystal

Palace exhibition, which was held on the ground of the current Bryant Park between July 1853

and November 1854, Commissioner Joseph Withworth (1854, pp. 55-68) included a detailed

description of the US patent system, emphasizing low fees:

“It remains to say a few words, in conclusion, on the scale of fees. These are extremely
moderate in the case of citizens, and the privileges and protection afforded by letters patent
are most properly placed within the reach of all citizen inventors” (Withworth 1854, p. 67)

Since then, economic historians have credited low fees with encouraging broad-based innovation

in the United States (e.g., Khan and Sokoloff 1993; 1998; 2001, Lamoreaux and Sokoloff 1999;

Khan 2005).

Notably Withworth (1854, p. 67) also describes the dramatically higher fees that the US

system levied on foreign, and especially British, inventors.

4
 “But foreigners labour under great disadvantages, being required, if British subjects, to pay
nearly seventeen times as much as a citizen ($500), if any other foreigner, ten times as much
as a citizen ($300).”

These fees are interesting for two reasons, which invite empirical analyses of their effects: First,

expensive fees probably discouraged foreigners from patenting their inventions in the United

States, which made it easier for US nationals to copy them. In spirit, this is reminiscent of

modern policies that weaken the patent rights of foreign inventors, such as compulsory licensing

(discussed below). Second, it is remarkable that the US system reserved the largest fees for

inventors from Britain, who were at the technology frontier. Taken together these featurs suggest

that the early US patent system may have encouraged economic development by reducing the

costs of copying foreign inventions.

A Continuing Search for Data on Innovation

Following the pioneering analyses of hand-collected data in Schmookler (1962 and 1966),

and Sokoloff (1988), patent counts have become the standard proxy for innovation. In recent

years, the availability of electronic data sets, such as the NBER’s Patents and Citations dataset

for 1976 to 2002 (Jaffe, Hall, and Trajtenberg 2001) and optical character recognition (OCR)

files of US patents since 1920, has further contributed to the popularity of patents as a focus for

research. 2

Yet it is important to keep in mind that patents are an “imperfect, fallible measure” of the

“net accretion of economically valuable knowledge” (Griliches 1990, p. 1670). This is

particularly important for analyses of patent laws because we need to understand what types – if

2
See Moser and Voena (2012), for a detailed description of Google/USPTO patent data since 1920, Moser et al.
(2014) for inventor-level data, and Lampe and Moser (2016) for historical data on patent citations since 1920.

5
any – innovations would be made in the absence of patent laws. By construction, patent data fail

to capture these innovations.

Studies of individual industries, such as Allen (1983) and Nuvolari (2004), have

addressed this issue by collecting independent measures of performance. That is, rather than

focusing on counts of patents or their citations, this research has attempted to directly measure

improvements of particular products. For example, Lampe and Moser (2010) use data on sewing

speeds to observe the rate of innovation in sewing machines. Similarly, Moser, Ohmstedt, and

Rhode (2014) compile data on advances in yields, and other biological characteristics of patented

corn hybrids, to measure the speed of biological innovation. Yet such performance measures are

impossible to construct in a manner that makes them comparable across industries. This feature

limits their use in empirical analysis of the direction of technical change, and other important

questions.

Observing Innovations with and without Patents: Historical Technology Fairs

Historical data on exhibits at world fairs make it possible to observe innovations -

irrespective of their patent status - across sectors, across countries, and over time. Starting with

the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, the organizers of these fairs systematically collected and

displayed technologies from across the world (Moser 2003, 2005, 2011, and 2012). The scale of

the fairs was unprecedented, and remains unparalleled today. In 1851, the Crystal Palace, a

1,848-foot long greenhouse of cast-iron and glass, was the largest enclosed space on earth; it

housed 17,062 exhibitors from 40 countries; at a time when London had less than 2 million

inhabitants, more than 6 million tickets were sold. The American Centennial Exhibition in

Philadelphia in 1876 attracted more than 10 million visitors (Kroker 1975, p. 146). To see all

6
10,863 exhibits from 35 countries at the Centennial fair, a visitor had to walk the equivalent of a

marathon. Another important fair, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, covered

717 acres in Jackson Park by Lake Michigan; it attracted 27.5 million visitors. Finally, to host

the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, its organizers drained a

swampy part of the San Francisco Bay, which later became the Presidio. This fair welcomed

30,000 exhibitors from 32 countries and 19 million visitors.

Exhibits were recorded in catalogues that helped visitors navigate the fairs. Many of these

catalogues became significant reference works for the current state of technology. For example,

Britain’s Official Catalogue of the great exhibition of the work of industry of all nations (1851)

became a “book of reference to the philosopher, merchant, and manufacturer” (Auerbach 1999, p.

94) to an exhibition that was a “veritable acting industrial encyclopaedia” (Tallis 1852, p. 234;

The Times, December 5, 1850). Catalogue entries include the exhibitor’s name, location, and a

description of the exhibit:

406, Fourdrinier, E. N., 38 Barclay St., Sunderland, Patent safety apparatus, for preventing
loss of life and destruction of property when a rope or chain breaks in shafts of mines and
collieries.

In addition to the prize-winning reaper and Colt’s revolver, examples of exhibits included power-

loom lathes, and the first sewing machines.

As a means of quality control, exhibits were subject to a systematic and careful process of

selection. 3 Commissioners for the Crystal Palace Fair visited cities and rural areas to set up local

selection committees and to ensure broad-based representation (Bericht 1853, pp. 40 and 64,

Auerbach 1999, p. 55 and 87). National papers, such as the British Times, Economist, and Sun,

3
By comparison, selection processes at smaller regional fairs in the US and Britain and even at later world’s fairs
was substantially more haphazard (e.g., Khan 2014), and exhibits at these fairs may not be a good proxy for
innovation.

7
and the US Scientific American advertised the fairs in regular features (e.g., The Times,

November 14, 20, December 6, 9, and 30, 1850). In Britain, 65 local commissions formed more

than 300 sub-commissions (Auerbach 1999, p. 32). Local committees selected exhibits in the

first round; their submissions competed at the national level. Among these selections, national

committees chose the most promising innovations to represent their country in a hard-fought

international “contest of industries” (Kretschmer 1999, pp. 46-48; Auerbach 1999, pp. 68-69, 78

and 189). Less than 30 percent of applicants were admitted to the fair (Bericht 1853, pp. 50 and

117). After the fair, universities, scientists, and museums competed to purchase exhibits

(Auerbach 1999, p. 105, 120).

A concern with exhibition data is that transportation costs may have influenced the

selection of exhibits and that exhibits from host countries were over-represented. For example,

three-fourths of the 13 acres in Machinery Hall were taken up with American machines in 1876,

including the colossal Corliss steam engine, which provided power to the fair (Andrews 1894, p.

73). The influence of transportation costs was mitigated because heavy, large, or fragile

inventions were presented by models. In 1851, for example, 88 of 194 British exhibits in “Civil

Engineering, Architecture, and Building Contrivance,” were represented by models, including a

770-meter long chain suspension bridge across the Dnepr in Kiev (Rolt 1970, p. 157). Similarly,

T. Powell of Monmouthshire, Britain, exhibited a “Model for apparatus used for shipment of

coals from boats or waggons at Cardiff dock” at the Crystal Palace, and A.Watney of Llanelly,

Wales, exhibited “Models of anthracite blast furnaces.” 4

4
Another potential source of bias stems from restrictions on exhibition space, which were set by the host country.
Anecdotal evidence, however, indicates that such restrictions may not have been binding. For example, when the US
commission to the Crystal Palace thought that US exhibitors would be short on exhibition space, it asked the British
commission for more room and was granted its request (Haltern 1971, p. 150). Floor plans for the Centennial

8
Many Important Innovations Occur Outside of the Patent System

Although prominent accounts have emphasized the importance of patents in stimulating

innovation (e.g., Sokoloff and Lamoreaux 1999), exhibition data show that the majority of 19th-

century innovations occurred outside of the patent system. In 1851, for example, only 11 percent

of British exhibits were patented. Such low patenting rates are more consistent with alternative

explanations that emphasize a culture of entrepreneurship (Landes 1969), the free exchange of

knowledge (Allen 1983, Nuvolari 2004), and investments in science (Arora and Rosenberg 1998;

Mowery and Rosenberg 1998) as potential sources for innovation. 5

In addition to capturing innovation without patents, exhibition data also make it possible

to control for the quality of innovations through prizes that were granted to a small share of

exceptional inventions. These data raise a question for empirical and theoretical research: Are

inventors more or less likely to patent high-quality inventions? Existing theories of innovation

predict that firms are more likely to use secrecy if innovations are important. Patents require

disclosure, which is risky if patents cannot effectively prevent competitors from using a patented

invention (Anton and Yao 2004; Horstmann, MacDonald, and Slivinski 1985). Exhibition data,

however, show that high-quality exhibits were slightly more likely to be patented. In 1851, 15

percent of Britain’s prize-winning exhibits were patented, compared with 11 percent of average-

quality exhibits. Notably, the prize data also show that the large majority of prize-winning

exhibition show that 11 countries, including Germany, Britain, Spain, and Sweden, built additional exhibition space
on the Centennial grounds.
5
Low patenting rates are particularly remarkable considering that exhibition data may be biased towards recording
patented inventions, if inventors were reluctant to exhibit inventors that were protected by secrecy. To address this
problem, the U.K. government created a registration system to offer “Protection from Piracy to Persons exhibiting
new Inventions.” Only 600 exhibitors (less than 3.3 percent) took advantage of this system. Instead exhibitors
advertised the finished product, rather than the machines that had made it, to maintain secrecy surrounding the
machine. For example, Drewsen & Sons of Silkeborg, Jutland, exhibited “Specimens of paper, glazed by a machine
constructed by the exhibitor,” instead of their paper-making machine (Official Catalogue 1851, p. 210).

9
inventions were not patented, which calls into question the importance of patents as a driver of

high-quality invention.

Patent Laws Were not Necessary for Innovation

The 19th century offers a unique setting to examine the effects of patent laws on

innovation because no other period had a comparable amount of exogenous variation in national

laws. In 1851, the statutory length of a patent varied from no protection in Denmark and

Switzerland to 14 years in Britain and the United States, and 15 years in Bavaria, Belgium, and

the Netherlands. Much of this variation was in place because countries had adopted patent laws

according to idiosyncratic allegiances of national rulers (Penrose 1951, p. 13). Another benefit of

the empirical setting is that it precedes the period of intense lobbying from interests that

dominate debates today.

Exhibition data show that the existence of patent laws was not a necessary condition for

high levels of innovation (Moser 2003). Crystal Palace data in Moser (2005, Table 1) include

11,610 exhibits from 12 Northern European countries in 1851. Two of these countries –

Switzerland and Denmark - offered no patent protection. Data for the Philadelphia Centennial

Exhibition cover 6,482 exhibits from 10 Northern European countries in 1876. Two of them –

Switzerland and the Netherlands - offered no patent protection, and 3 had short-lived patents.

Notably, the absence of patent protection did not prevent innovation in countries without patent

laws. In 1851, for example, Switzerland contributed 110 exhibits per one millions Swiss citizens,

which was two times the mean of the average country, and three times compared with the

median of 36 exhibits per 1 million people. Switzerland also won a disproportionate number of

prizes, with 47 per 1 million people, more than twice the mean value of 20 and more than 4 times

10
the median of 11. Switzerland continued to lead innovation in food processing (e.g., by

improving milk chocolate and ready-made meals), all before adopting a full-fledged patent

system in 1907.

Even with Low Fees, Most Innovations were not Patented

Most economists understand intuitively that many important innovations - ranging from

19th century dyes and scientific instruments to Ford’s conveyer belt and the famously secrective

Coca Cola – were not patented. Yet, it is difficult to determine how important non-patenting is

quantitatively, and whether it varies across sectors and over time. 6 Exhibition data allow

researchers to measure such variation across industries, over time, and - importantly - across

patent systems.

In 1851, patent fees in Britain ranged between £100 and £120 in Britain “approximately 4

times per capita income in 1860” (Khan 2005, p. 31). In addition, inventors faced a cumbersome

process with legal fees and bribes (MacLeod 1988, p. 76; Dutton 1984). In Charles Dicken’s “A

Poor Man’s Tale of the Patent System” (1868, p. 228), the fictional inventor Old John complains:

“Look at the Home Secretary, the Attorney-General, the Patent Office, the Engrossing Clerk,
the Lord Chancellor, the Privy Seal, the Clerk of Patents, the Lord Chancellor’s Purse-bearer,
the Clerk of the Hanaper, the Deputy Clerk of the Hanaper, the Deputy Sealer, and the Deputy
Chaff-was. No man in England could get a patent for an Indian-rubber band or an iron hopp,
without feeing all of them. Some of them, over and over again”

By comparison, US patent fees were substantially lower. Moreover, inventors could submit their

patent applications by mail, which should have made it much easier for rural inventors to apply

6
The most complete evidence in modern settings come from survey data (Levin, Klevorick, Nelson, and Winter
1987; Cohen, Nelson, and Walsh 2000), which suggest that chemicals and pharmaceuticals relied strongly on
patents, while most other industries relied heavily on secrecy.

11
for a patent. Khan and Sokoloff (1998 and 2001) have credited the superior design of the US

patent system with encouraging the “democratization” of invention in the United States.

“The British system reflected its origin in royal privilege and effectively limited access to a
select class of patentees. In contrast, the United States established the world's first modern
patent institution, one that was consciously designed to stimulate participation in invention
across a wide spectrum of the population” (Khan and Sokoloff 1998, p. 295)

Yet exhibition data show that US patenting rates were only slightly higher than British patenting

rates; the difference was less than five percentage points (Moser 2012, p. 54). These results

challenge the view that the design of the US patent system played an important role in

stimulating high levels of innovation (Lamoreaux and Sokoloff 1998; Sokoloff and Khan 1998,

2001).

Location data for inventors, however, provide some suggestive evidence in favor of the

hypothesis that the US patent system helped democratize innovation. A first test compares

variation in patenting rates across urban and rural areas in Britain and the United States. With the

caveat that the data include only 574 observations across the United States, there are no

noticeable systematic differences in patenting rates across urban and rural areas in the United

States (Moser 2012, pp. 13-14, Table 4). By comparison, British patenting rates (for a sample of

more than 6,000 exhibits) were significantly higher in London, compared with rural rates. These

findings highlight the need for further analyses to examine the role of access costs in determining

the effectiveness of patents.

Similar to Today, Litigation Risks were Extremely Damaging

A potential explanation for the low rates at which valuable innovations in the United

Sates were patented is that even though the costs of patent applications were low, the costs of

12
patent enforcement may have been substantial. Dutton (1984) observes that US courts were more

likely to uphold the patent rights of original inventors, while British courts tended to be more

anti-patent. Khan (2005) argues that this pro-patent attitude encouraged invention in the United

States. The US Patent Act of 1793 specified that “simply changing the form or proportion of any

machine…shall not be deemed a discovery.” It was, however, often left to the courts determine

the boundaries between the original inventor’s patent and the next invention that was sufficiently

novel to merit a new patent. Eli Whitney, for example, patented a saw gin in 1793 that could be

used to remove seeds from short staple upland varieties of cotton (Olmstedt and Rhode, 2008 p.

1130, Lakwete 2003, p. 67-68). Whitney’s patent remained subject to litigation until December

1807, one month after it had expired. The knowledge of such cases may have led inventors to

incorporate litigation risks into the expected costs of patenting, and avoid patents whenever

possible.

Litigation risks were particularly high when US courts enforced overly broad patents that

had been issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In 1846, for example, the US

Patent and Trademark Office issued patent 4,750 to Elias Howe for an “Improvement in Sewing

Machines.” Howe’s patent was broad enough to cover most commercially viable sewing

machines at the time. Like a 21st-century “patent troll,” Howe used his patent to threaten

litigation, instead of commercializing his invention. In 1852, a District Court upheld Howe’s

patent, and he began to collect license fees of $25 per machine, roughly one-fifth the average

price of a sewing machine (Lampe and Moser 2014). When other firms sued based on their own

patents, production came to a halt during the 1851–1856 “sewing machine wars” (Bissell 1999, p.

84). By 1867, Howe had received $2 million in license fees (Parton, 1867), roughly $30 million

in 2014 dollars.

13
Patent Pools Discouraged Innovation

To resolve litigation, Elias Howe, the Singer Company, and two other manufacturers

formed the first patent pool, the Sewing Machine Combination in 1856. Like contemporary pools,

the Combination allowed its members to use each others’ patents, and license all pool patents

together as a bundle to outside firms. Litigation data confirm that the creation of a pool reduced

litigation risks for members (Lampe and Moser 2010, p. 900). The pool also reduced license fees

from $25 per machine for Howe’s patent to $5 for the bundle of patents for members and $15 for

outside firms. Patenting, however, declined after the pool formed and increased again only after

it dissolved in 1877, with the expiration of the last broad patent (Lampe and Moser 2010, p. 913).

A comparison with Britain’s sewing machine industry, which had no patent pool, suggests that

this decline in innovation was limited to the United States. In Britain, sewing machine patents

continued to increase gradually as a share of all patents until the early 1870s and experienced no

increase after 1877.

Did the decline in US patenting represent a decline in innovation? Here again the

difference between patents and innovation is important: Patenting may decline because inventors

no longer have to create “patent thickets” (Shapiro 2001) to protect themselves from litigiation.

With a little bit of detective work, economic history can answer this question. Articles on sewing

machines in 19th-century magazines, such as the Scientific American and the Lady’s Home

Journal, suggest that contemporary customers valued sewing machines that were light, quiet, and,

most importantly fast. Sewing speed is measured as the number of stitches per minute that a

machine could perform, and it is reported on contemporary trade cards and catalogues, which we

were able to access in the records of the Smithsonian Institution. These data indicate that

14
improvements in sewing speed slowed soon after the pool had been established and increased

again after it had dissolved (Lampe and Moser 2010, pp. 916–17).

The experience of the sewing machine industry also suggests another important policy

implication of patent pools for the direction of technical change. Data on patents and firm entry

indicate that the creation of a patent pool diverted innovation away from the pool technology

towards a substitute technology that was already understood to be inferior (Lampe and Moser

2014). As long as the pool created a significant wedge between license fees for members and

outsiders, outsiders entered with the substitute because they needed to avoid licensing and

litigation. Data on firm survivals show that firms that entered with the substitute were

significantly more likely to fail compared with other entrants, suggesting that the shift towards

the substitute technology was socially wasteful.

Whether these results are generalizable to other industries and modern pools is an open

question. A companion study of pools that formed across a broad range of 20 industries in the

1930s, however, unambiguously confirms the decline in patenting (Lampe and Moser 2014). In

the absence of effective antitrust, dominant firms used a pool to further limit and discourage

competition by outside firms. We find that this reduction in competition was associated with a

significant decline in innovation.

These results highlight the need for additional empirical and theoretical analyses of patent

pools. Theoretical models of the price effects of pools are well developed (Shapiro 2001; Lerner

and Tirole 2004), but a pool’s effect on innovation is less well understood. Importantly, existing

theoretical models focus almost exclusively on pool members and ignore effects on outside firms.

Yet, outside firms account for more than 90 percent of all patents in industries with patent pools

(Lampe and Moser 2014), which suggests that ignoring them can bias theoretical predictions.

15
Compulsory Licensing Encouraged Innovation

Another prominent mechanism of intellectual property policies is “compulsory licensing,”

which allows government agencies to license foreign-owned patents inventions to domestic firms

- without the consent of foreign patent owners. This policy is a central concern in international

debates. WTO rules allow developing countries to use it if negotiations with foreign patent

owners fail, and countries such as Brazil and Thailand have used compulsory licensing to

improve access to foreign-owned pharmaceuticals, including drugs to treat HIV/AIDS.

While it is impossible to predict the effects of such interventions on innovation, historical

episodes of compulsory licensing create opportunities for empirical analysis. In 1917, the US

Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) empowered government agencies, such as the Chemical

Foundation, to license German-owned patents to US firms. The Act’s primary goal was to place

all enemy property, including patents, “beyond the control or influence of its former owners”

(Alien Property Custodian 1919, p. 13 and 17). By February 22, 1919, the U.S. Alien Property

Custodian (1919, p. 7), A. Mitchell Palmer announced that “practically all known enemy

property in the United States has been taken over by me.” In 1919, the US Chemical Foundation

began to issue nonexclusive licenses for enemy-owned patents to US firms.

In one of the first analyses of the USPTO/Google bulk data patent files, Moser and Voena

(2012, p. 404) show that compulsory licensing of German-owned patents in organic chemistry

led to a 20 percent increase in US invention for affected technologies. Their baseline estimates

compare changes in patent grants per year after 1918 for 336 technologies with compulsory

licensing with changes in patent grants for a control group of 7,248 technologies without

16
licensing in the same industry. Lee and Moser (2015) extend these results to an economy-wide

analysis during World War II.

Methodologically, the analysis exploits the USPTO’s detailed classification system to

distinguish narrowly-defined technologies (measured at the level of USPTO subclasses) that

were differentially affected by compulsory licensing. Technology fixed effects (at the level of

USPTO subclasses) and year fixed effects, as well as technology-specific trends, control for

variation in the use of patents across technologies and over time. This approach makes it possible

to control for unobservable factors, such as improvements in education or protectionist tariffs,

which may have encouraged US innovation in chemicals regardless of compulsory licensing.

Firms under threat of compulsory licensing today argue that it will weaken their

incentives to invest in R&D. The historical records, however, suggests the opposite. Baten,

Moser, and Bianchi (2015) collect and analyze firm-level data on German patents to examine

invention by German firms that were differentially affected by compulsory licensing under the

TWEA. This analysis indicates that compulsory licensing was associated with a 28 percent

increase in patenting by German inventors. Controlling for variation in the quality of patents

(through renewal data) indicates that some of the observed increase was due to an increase in

lower quality patents, possibly as firms built a “thicket” of strategic patents around technologies

that were now threatened by entry. But even with quality controls, we find that compulsory

licensing led to a 17 percent increase in high-value German patents.

Patents Have been Useful in Some Industries – but Not in Others

Does this mean that intellectual property rights always hold back innovation? Probably

not, but to answer the question economists must understand when inventors use and don’t use

17
patents. Exhibition data reveal a great deal of variation in the use of patents across industries and

over time. In 1851, for example, fewer than 5 percent of Britain’s chemical exhibits were

patented, 10 percent of scientific instruments, and 8 percent of exhibits in food processing,

compared with 20 percent of manufacturing machinery (Moser 2012, p. 46). The data also show

that – despite the most substantial differences in national patent systems – US inventors appear

to have relied on patents, and avoided them in the same industries as British inventors (Moser

2012 p. 58). Echoing results on low overall patenting rates in the United States, these findings

suggest that the institutional features of the US patent system did not significantly affect

patenting behavior.

What determines variation in the use of patents across industries? Qualitative evidence

points to variation in the effectiveness of secrecy, as an alternative to patents. With crude tools of

chemical analysis, secrecy was an effective mechanism to protect mid-19th-century

improvements in chemicals, because competitors could not yet reverse-engineer improvements.

Commercially valuable dyes, such as indigo, proved immune to reverse-engineering, despite

considerable efforts in industrial espionage until the late 19th century (Haber 1958, p. 83).

Secrecy was also effective in protecting improvements in scientific instruments, such as the

rectangular prisms of Swiss glassmakers and the optical instruments of Danish makers (Bericht I,

1852 pp. 813–19, 930–41). Scientific breakthroughs, such as Dmitrii Mendeleev’s publication of

the periodic table in 1869, increased the risks associated with the use of secrecy, as they

transformed chemical analysis in the second half of the 19th century (Haber, 1958, p. 81).

Exhibition data show that advances in methods of scientific analysis, which made it

possible for the first time to reverse-engineer many types of innovations, intensified inventors’

dependency on patents. At the world’s fairs of 1851 and 1876, 0 and 5 percent of US chemical

18
innovations were patented. By 1893 and 1915, 19 and 20 percent of US chemical innovations

were patented. At the same time, innovations in manufacturing machinery remained unaffected

by improvements in scientific methods, because they had always been easy to reverse-engineer.

Patenting rates for these innovations stayed roughly constant between 44 and 49 percent for

manufacturing machinery (Moser 2012, pp. 62-67). This suggests that the shift towards patenting

was due to the reduced effectiveness of secrecy in chemicals, rather than an economy-wide

increase in the use of patents.

Intellectual Property Rights for Living Organisms Have Not Encouraged Innovation

A contentious question is whether animals and plants should be subject to patent

protection. Until 1930, living organisms could not be patented. In the aftermath of World War I,

however, concerns about food security motivated the passage 1930 US Plant Patent Act, which

created intellectual property rights for plants that propagate (asexually) through roots rather than

seeds. In support of the Act, plant breeders had argued that they needed intellectual property

rights to protect their investments in R&D because competitors could easily reproduce an

improved plant – which had taken years to develop - by taking a cutting. Stark Brothers Nursery

for example, had built a cage with a burglar alarm to prevent competitors from taking cuttings of

their improved Golden Delicious apple (Moser and Rhode 2012). Responding to these arguments,

Congress hoped to encourage the development of a domestic US plant breeding industry by

creating plant patent rights.

Data on US plant patent grants, however, show that nearly half of all US plant patent

grants beween 1930 and 1970 were for were roses (Moser and Rhode 2012, pp. 418–420). Had

the provision of intellectual property helped to encourage the creation of a research-based US

19
rose breeding industry? Until World War II, US nurseries were dependant on imported nursery

stock from Europe. In the 1940s commercial nurseries began to build their own mass

hybridization programs. In a striking parallel to pharmaceutical R&D, it takes up to 12 years to

develop a new rose, and most attempts to create new roses fail; fewer than 1 in 1,000 seedlings

typically lead to a commercially successful new rose (Robb 1964, p. 389). Yet, as soon as a

breeder succeeds in developing a new rose, competitors can propagate it by stealing cuttings.

To examine whether the creation of plant patents encouraged innovation, we again

construct an alternative (no-patent) measure of innovation in roses. This measure draws on

registration records for newly-created rose varieties between 1916 and 1970. Matching

registration records with plant patents shows that less than 20 percent of newly registered roses

after 1930 were protected by a plant patent (Moser and Rhode 2012, pp. 429-434), again

highlighting the fact that most innovations are not patented.

Registration data also indicate that US breeders created fewer new roses after 1931. In

fact, lineage data show that most roses that are commercially successful today are descendants of

roses that public-sector, rather than private-sector, plant scientists developed before the creation

of plant patents. These results indicate that plant patent played no significant role in encouraging

innovation in rose breeding, and they highlight the need for analyses of other sectors.

Patent Laws have Changed the Direction of Innovation

If patents are important in some industries (such as manufacturing machinery) but not in

others (such as scientific instruments or chemicals in the 19th century), changes in patent laws

may influence the direction if not the level of technical change (Moser 2005). These patterns are

borne out in exhibition data: Countries without patent laws contribute as many exhibits and prize

20
winners as countries with patent law. But their innovations are disproportionately focused on

industries in which secrecy is effective, so that inventors are less dependent on patents. At the

Crystal Palace, one-fourth of exhibits from countries without patent laws were scientific

instruments, compared with one-seventh of exhibits from other countries (Figure 2; Moser 2005).

(Figure 1 about here)

After the Netherlands abolished its patent protection – as a result of a political victory of

the free-trade party in 1869 – Dutch innovations shifted towards food processing, another

industry in which secrecy was effective. Between 1851 and 1876, the share of Dutch innovations

in food processing increased from 11 to 37 percent (Moser 2005). Many other innovations in this

industry, including milk chocolate, baby foods, and ready-made soups, were made in Switzerland

and the Netherlands when neither country had a patent law (Schiff 1971, pp. 52–58).

The case of margarine illustrates the effectiveness of secrecy compared with patents. The

French chemist Mège Mouriès disclosed the process of producing margarine to the Dutch

entrepreneurs Jurgens and van den Bergh, believing that he was protected by a patent. In 1871,

however, while the Netherlands did not have patent laws, Jurgens and van den Bergh began to

manufacture margarine there. After the partners argued and split, van den Bergh independently

improved the taste of margarine, and Jurgens failed to reverse-engineer van den Bergh’s

improved margarine until 1905 (Schiff 1971).

Patent Laws Have Changed the Geography of Innovations

21
 One important area for future analyses relates to the role that intellectual property rights

play in determining the geography of innovation. Can variation in the use of patents help to

explain why some regions – within the same country and the same patent system – are more

innovative than others?

Accounts of innovation in Britain and the United States indicate that knowledge sharing

without patents laid the foundations for innovation and technical change (Allen 1983; Nuvolari

2004; Thomson 2009). For example, technical performance in the Cleveland (UK) iron-smelting

district improved rapidly between 1850 and 1875, as iron producers shared technical details

about the construction and performances of blast furnaces (Allen 1983). Yet these benefits

appear to be extremely localized.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the ability to protect ideas through intellectual property

rights encourages inventors to talk about them, and allow future generations of inventors to build

on their ideas. Many inventors, such as Mège Mouriès, were more willing to disclose technical

information when they felt protected by patents. The British inventor Robert Ransome, for

example, only began to advertise his plough-shares in Norwich and East Anglia after he received

a patent in 1803 (MacLeod 1988, p. 100). Moreover, historical records suggest that, in the

absence of patent protection, artisans took fierce measures to prevent the knowledge of new

technologies from spreading to outsiders. Thus silk weavers in 17th-century Bologna hanged

Ugolino Menzani because he had shared the knowledge of a new silk twisting machine with

Venetian weavers (Belfanti 2004, p. 581).

Thus the availability of intellectual property rights may encourage the diffusion of new

ideas, and thereby enable follow-on invention. Although encouraging the diffusion of new

22
technologies is one of the two key goals of the US patent system, there is little systematic

empirical evidence on the effectiveness of patents in encouraging diffusion.

The shift towards patenting in chemicals (documented in Moser 2012), however, creates

an opportunity to examine whether a shift towards patenting can encourage the geographic

diffusion of innovative activity. In chemistry, inventors began to rely more on patents after a

series of scientific breakthroughs (including the creation of the periodic table) reduced the

effectiveness of secrecy. Geographic data on the location of origins of exhibits show that

chemical innovations became significantly more geographically diffused after 1851. By

comparison, the localization of innovation in manufacturing machinery (which did not

experience a shift towards patenting) remained unchanged. Data from the US Decennial Census

between 1840 and 1920 also show that the geographic decentralization of chemical innovations

cannot be explained by changes in the localization of production. While chemical exhibits

became less localized after 1876, chemical production remained relatively stable.

These results are consistent with the hypothesis that intellectual property rights can

encourage the diffusion of innovation, but more empirical evidence is needed to identify these

effects.

Narrow Intellectual Property Rights - through Copyrights - as a Promising Alternative

Can economists help to identify alternative mechanisms to protect intellectual property

without the shortcomings of patents? One promising alternative are copyrights, which create

intellectual property rights that are substantially more narrow than patents. An extremely stylized

example helps to illustrate the difference in scope: A copyright for Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca

(1900) protects the specific score and libretto, whereas a patent could in principle protect the idea

23
of an opera about two unlucky artists in love. Because copyrights are so much narrower than

patents, they avoid many pitfalls of broad patents, which makes them an appealing alternative to

patents for software and many other fields. Moreover, the growing importance of digital content,

which is primarily protected through copyrights, highlights the need for understanding the effects

of copyrights. Yet – with a few notable exceptions, such as Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007),

Reimers (2014), and Waldfogel (2012) – copyrights are understudied by economists.

In the case of copyrights, the key tradeoff is encouraging the creation of new cultural

goods and allowing for their use by consumers and other artists. Initial evidence suggests that

basic levels of copyright protection can encourage creativity and innovation. Starting from low

levels of existing protection, extensions in copyright length for Romantic Period authors raised

the price of books (Li, MacGarvie, and Moser 2014) and increased payments to authors, even

though most of the gains accrued to a small number of exceptionally popular authors, such as Sir

Walter Scott (MacGarvie and Moser 2014).

The introduction of copyrights also appears to have caused an increase in both the

quantity and the quality of operas in 19th century Italy. Italian states that came under Napoleon’s

rule before 1804 (when France adopted the code civil), adopted the French copyright law of 1793,

whereas Italian states that came under Napoleon’s rule after 1804 did not get copyrights. Data on

the quantity, popularity, and durability of new operas indicate that the introduction of copyrights

led to an increase in the quantity and quality of operas (Giorcelli and Moser 2015). These data

also show that copyright extensions beyond the life of the composer have no effects on creativity.

Copyrights, do, however, come at the cost of restricting access to existing works. These

costs may be especially high when copyrights extend beyond the life of the composer and are

extremely long, as they are in the United States and Europe today, where copyright length

24
approach 100 years. Broadly speaking, restrictions on access (and higher prices as a result of

copyrights) increase the costs of access to existing works, which build the foundation for future

generations of what Suzanne Scotchmer (1991) called “cumulative research.”

To investigate the effects of copyrights on “cumulative” or “follow-on” science, Biasi

and Moser (2015) exploit a historical event of copyright violations under the World War II Book

Replication Program (BRP).This program issued temporary, 6-month licenses for German-

owned copyrights to US publishers, who then reprinted exact copies of German science books

and sold them for a lower price to US libraries and firms.

Citations data indicate that the BRP resulted in a significant increase in new books and

publications that built on German science books. A simple model of knowledge production

predicts a differential effect of copyrights on human-capital intensive industries, and a

comparison of changes for mathematics and chemistry confirms this prediction: Notably, the

increase in citations was much more pronounced in mathematics – which was more dependent on

human capital – than in chemistry. Intuitively, US mathematicians who now had access to a copy

of Courant and Hilbert’s “Methods of Mathematical Physics” at their local university library,

relied only on their human capital to use methods of mathematical physics in their own research.

Chemists, however, were more likely to also require access to physical capital, in the form of

laboratory space, to use the knowledge in a BRP book in their own research.

Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

Economic history offers unique data sets and a wealth of exogenous variation to analyze

the effects of intellectual property rights to innovation. For example, exhibits at 19th-century

world fairs offer a rare alternative (non-patent) measure of innovation to examine the effects of

25
patent laws at a time when several countries had not yet adopted patent laws or abolished them

for political reasons. These data indicate that the large majority of historical innovations occurred

outside of the patent system. Moreover, they reveal that countries without patent laws, such as

Switzerland and the Netherlands, were at least as innovative as countries with patent laws.

Comparisons across industries also show that the need for patents varies significantly across

industries and over time. This need for patents has been strongest when innovations were easy to

reverse-engineer, so that inventors could not (or no longer) rely on secrecy to protect their

innvoations. At an economy-wide level, such differences have influenced the direction of

technical change, even when they failed to increase levels of innovation.

More generally intellectual property rights appear to have been most beneficial when they

were narrow and short-lived. Compulsory licensing, for example, forces patent owners to license

their inventions to new firms, including potential competitors. This policy has encouraged

innovation - not only by the firms that benefit from improved access, but by the original owners

of licensed patents, who now face more competition. Similarly, patent pools that allow

competitors to combine their patents have discouraged innovation, in part by making it more

difficult for entrants to compete with incumbents that have formed a pool.

Interestingly, initial results on the effectiveness of copyrights suggest that basic levels of

copyrights (which are significantly more narrow than patents) can encourage creativity. But

these results also suggest that extensions in the length of copyrights trigger no additional boost in

creativity. Such extensions may in fact create significant welfare losses by discouraging the

diffusion of cultural goods. These effects are particularly severe for science, a field in which the

creation of new knowledge depends critically on access to existing work.

26
 Many important questions and research opportunities remain. For example, what are the

effects of intellectual property rights on the diffusion of innovation? Can basic levels of property

rights help to ensure a broad-based participation in processes of creativity and innovation? And

are copyrights a useful alternative to patents? Historical analyses can shed light on these

questions – with the benefit of distance, new data sets, and careful empirical analyses.

Although the focus of this essay has been on intellectual property rights, the creation of

“economically valuable knowledge” (e.g., Griliches 1990) is also vitally dependent on human

capital: inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. To encourage innovation, economic policies

must enable and encourage these individuals to invest in creativity and innovation. A small

number of existing studies suggest that basic levels of intellectual property rights can encourage

broad-based participation, e.g., by rural inventors (Khan 2005, Moser 2011) and by individuals

of modest means who depend on creative work for income (MacGarvie and Moser 2014). Given

the enormous welfare implications of getting the most talented individuals to participate in

innovation, economic analyses of these issues are critical.

Another topic for future research concerns interactions between intellectual property

rights and policies towards science and immigration. Economic history offers a wealth of settings

to examine these policies. For example, the United States received an unprecedented inflow of

German-Jewish scientists after the Nazi regime took power in 1933. These arrivals helped

transform chemical innovation: Research fields in which the United States received an émigré

experienced a 31 percent boost in domestic patenting (Moser, Voena, and Waldinger 2014). The

importance of émigrés is also confirmed in preliminary analyses of 19th century operas in Italy

(Giorcelli and Moser 2015), where a large share of the observed increase in creativity in states

with copyrights was due to émigrés.

27
 Finally, the supply of scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs is grounded in individual-

level differences, that are not typically amenable to economic research. Historical biographies

reveal exceptional traits of resilience and optimism among creative individuals, ranging from

Charles Goodyear (who developed vulcanized rubber) to Sir Walter Scott (the author of Ivanhoe).

Anecdotal evidence also suggests a link between certain types of mental disorders (such as

bipolar disorder) and creativity. Preliminary analyses confirm the existence of such links in

modern data, and suggest that they have responded positively to medical innovations (e.g., Biasi,

Dahl and Moser 2015). Like other research in this essay, these findings highlight the enormous

social gains from identifying sources of creativity and innovation.

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 Figure 1 – Shares of Exhibits in Scientific Instruments against Patent Length in 1851

0.30
0.27 Sw itzerland
0.25
0.23 Denmark
Share of instruments

0.20

0.15
0.14 Bavaria
0.10 0.08 Britain
0.10 Wuerttemb, 0.10 France
0.05 0.05 Prussia

0.04 Belgium
-
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Patent length

Sources: From Moser (2005). “Share of instruments” measures the proportion of a country’s
exhibits that occur in the industry class “scientific instruments.” Patent length measures the
maximum duration of a patent grant in 1851.

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