Title: Invented by law
Description: Beauchamp reconstructs the world of nineteenth-century patent law, replete with inventors, capitalists, and charlatans, where rival claimants and political maneuvering loomed large in the contests that erupted over new technologies. He challenges the popular myth of Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers. More than anyone else, it was the courts that anointed Bell father of the telephone, granting him a patent monopoly that decisively shaped the American telecommunications industry for a century to come. Beauchamp investigates the sources of Bell’s legal primacy in the United States, and looks across the Atlantic, to Britain, to consider how another legal system handled the same technology in very different ways.
Subjects: Telecommunication, Patent laws and legislation, Law and legislation, Inventors, Patents, History, Bell, alexander graham, 1847-1922, Telecommunication, law and legislation, Patents, united states
Places: United States
People: Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)