Invented by law : Alexander Graham Bell and the patent that changed America / Christopher Beauchamp.

272 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

9780674368064
0674368061 hardback
9780674735545 electronic book
0674735544 electronic book

G 111 BEA.I

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.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-260) and index.

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2015.

English