Against Intellectual Monopoly

some
justification for having awarded him a monopoly. Of course, if others were
going to discover it in a few years anyway, then it scarcely made sense to
give him a long-term monopoly. As it happens, simultaneous discoveries
tend to be the rule rather than the exception, and, in the presence of a
patent system, they almost always lead to some ugly story. Those that follow
may not be the most remarkable from a social point of view; they are just,
among those we happen to have learned about, those that we found most
significant. Many more, most certainly, are sitting out there, just waiting to be told. Because, you see, simultaneous discovery is not the exception; it is
the rule, and even that greatest of all the modern innovators, our beloved
James Watt, stumbled on to it, as Carnegie reports: "His first discovery was
that of latent heat. When communicating this to Professor Black he found
that his friend had anticipated him, and had been teaching it in lectures to
his students for some years past."37

    Since then, things have changed little along this dimension - if anything,
simultaneous discovery has become more and more the rule, not the exception, nowadays. Academics, playing all kinds of tricks to "plant their flag
first" and striving to publish that little working paper three days earlier than
their colleagues who have reached the same result, are well aware of this
fundamental fact. But patents on (very) basic research are not available yet -
hence, the race to be first, until now, has affected only individual prestige
and salaries. In those areas where patents are available, the impact has been
much more dramatic, both for the individuals involved and for society at
large.
Radio Waves
    The radio, according to popular history, was invented by the great inventor
Guglielmo Marconi. Indeed, some authors, such as Hong, go to great pains
to argue the originality of Marconi relative to that of his contemporaries
and the various other people that, between 1896 and 1898, claimed to have
reached, or to be poised to reach, wireless transmission of radio signals at a
substantial distance.38
    Abundant evidence, including the very same evidence reported by Hong
himself in his passionate defense of Marconi, suggests otherwise. There are
many competitors, which is to say that many people who have claimed to
have invented the radio in a form slightly different form, but functionally
equivalent, to that of Marconi. They range from the most official ones, the
British physicist Oliver Lodge in the United Kingdom and the forgotten
genius Nikola Tesla in the United States, to the least loved one, the Russian
Aleksander Popov - who, it is now clearly documented, described his findings in a paper published in 1895 and demonstrated the functioning of his
apparatus in front of the St. Petersburg Physical Society in March 1896 -
to the most relevant but least visible one, Henry B. Jackson, an engineer
working for the Royal Navy.
    The latter, who never complained about Marconi's patent and was in fact
a friend of Marconi's, writes in an official report of May 2, 1897:
    Comparing my experiments with those of Mr. Marconi, I would observe that before
I heard of his results, I had succeeded with the instruments at my disposal in transmitting Morse signals with my apparatus about 100 yards, which I gradually
increased to one-third of a mile, but could not improve upon till I obtained a
more powerful induction coil last month, with which I have obtained my present
results, using Marconi's system wires insulated in the air attached to transmitter
and receiver.... With this exception, the details of my apparatus, which so closely
resembles his, have been worked out quite.39

    Talk about understatement and gentlemanliness! The fact is that Marconi
was using established science at the time: long-run detection of Hertz waves
was a widely studied topic. Marconi's box was frontier engineering, certainly,
but there is no real scientific discovery in his black box. Similar experiments
were carried out by Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory
as early as 1895-96. In describing Marconi's equipment, which is extremely
similar to that of Rutherford and Jackson, even in terms of the size of
many parts, Hong concludes: "There was an element of `non-obviousness'
in Marconi's solutions: his grounding40 of one pole of the transmitter and
one pole of the receiver." So, Marconi's contribution