Against Intellectual Monopoly

to solving the puzzle
was the grounding of antenna and transmitter.
    Trotter, Threlfall, and Crookes were all anticipators of Marconi's findings.
Lodge's lecture to the August 1894 meeting of the British Association for
the Advancement of Sciences at Oxford on using Hertzian waves to transmit
signals also anticipated Marconi. Marconi started work on this in 1895. As
it is clear from his first filing for a patent on June 2, 1896, he does not really
understand Hertzian waves yet:
    In his patent for wireless telegraphy, Marconi claimed almost everything about the
use of the coherer (which had been invented by Branly and improved by FitzGerald
and Lodge) in wireless telegraphy. In May 1897, Lodge had applied a patent for a
system of wireless telegraphy of his own ... but he had had to withdraw his claims
on the coherer and the tapper because they had been so thoroughly covered by
Marconi.41
    Marconi's final specification for the patent in 1897 is a "different kind
of document entirely" from the initial one, thanks to the contribution of
J. Fletcher Moulton and others, and it successfully manages to patent pretty
much everything that goes into a radio, a radio transmitter, and a radio
receiver. Not bad for a guy whose contribution was to ground the antenna!
    Because Marconi came from an aristocratic family and had very good
connections in London, he was able to patent first and to get away with
patenting under his name lots of components that had been invented by
others. Also because of his family connections in the city's financial circles,
the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd. was readily established and
handsomely financed in 1897; it began thriving right away- its stock soaring from $3 to $22 in less than a year. The American Marconi Co. was formed
in 1899, attracting investments from local big guns of the size of Thomas
Edison and Andrew Carnegie. Then, on December 12, 1901, Marconi for
the first time transmitted and received signals across the Atlantic Ocean.
By 1903, the Marconi Company was carrying regular transatlantic news
transmissions. End of story. Well, not quite.

    Marconi may have been a glamorous and successful aristocrat, but he
was an Italian aristocrat, and his patent was so broad that it left everybody
else in England out in the cold. Furthermore, he was clearly appropriating
rights over instruments that he had not invented and that were already
widely used. All of this generated a strong reaction. Although this reaction
did not affect Marconi's financial fortunes, nor allow those left out in the
cold into the competition, it did at least leave enough documentation and
bad feelings that we can now learn something from this experience.
    To complete our learning, let us summarize what happened on the other
side of the Atlantic. Nikola Tesla, the forgotten genius who has only recently
come to renewed attention, filed for various radio patents in 1897. They were
granted in 1900. This led to a repeated rejection of Marconi's application
for a radio patent in the United States on the ground that Tesla's invention
preceded his. We learned that the Patent Office, in 1903, pointed out the
following while rejecting yet another Marconi application:
    Many of the claims are not patentable over Tesla patent numbers 645,576 and
649,621, of record, the amendment to overcome said references as well as Marconi's
pretended ignorance of the nature of a "Tesla oscillator" being little short of
absurd.... [T]he term "Tesla oscillator" has become a household word on both
continents.42
    So, why didn't N. Tesla Broadcasting Co. hold a complete monopoly over
radio communications in the United States until late in the 1920s? Why
did Nikola Tesla die poor while Marconi enriched himself, on his way to
a Nobel Prize? Because, you see, now like then, the game of patenting and
intellectual monopoly is not all that democratic and open to the little guys as
Ms. Khan's recent and altogether interesting book would like us to believe.
So, it is the case that Marconi, supported by the likes of Edison and Carnegie,
kept hammering the U.S. Patent Office until, in 1904, it reversed course and
gave Marconi a patent for the invention of radio: "The reasons for this have
never been fully explained, but the powerful financial backing for Marconi
in the United States suggests one possible explanation."43 We will spare
you the sad story of Nikola Tesla's hapless fight against Marconi, you