Meters, patents and expertise(s): Knowledge networks in the electricity meters industry, 1880-1914

摘要

Knowledge management in the British electrical industry was a highly proprietary activity where the practitioners sought patents in order to configure their market in a highly competitive industrial sector. This article focuses on the management of "intellectual property" assets in the electricity meters industry in Britain in a period when the electrical industry started gradually to become competitive in relation to the established manufactured gas industry. As an end use technology, the electricity meters sector was prone to appropriating proprietary innovation patterns due to the fierce competition that had existed since the 1880s. The article argues that "intellectual property" was managed through networks of expertise that expanded from the practitioners' workshops and laboratories to the pages of the technical press and the law courts. Expertise, authority and the meaning of the contested technologies were co-constructed, the one informing the other. While in public spaces, such as the technical journals and the engineering institutions, the emerging "scientific engineering" approach started to influence substantially the culture of invention and engineering, in the law courts the authority of "practice" was equally strong as that of "science" and it informed the culture of expertise and invention as they were shaped in the context of the courts. Through a performative historiographical approach the article unravels the dynamics of the proceedings, the role of experts and the co-construction of law, technologies and inventorship.