Removing the ‘Fuel of Interest’ from the ‘Fire of Genius’: Law and the Employee-Inventor, 1830–1930

Abstract

This chapter examines the development of the law respecting ownership of employee inventions during the American Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how employers and employees used law to define their respective control over the knowledge—what is now called human capital—that was often both the employee's and the employer's most valuable asset. The chapter describes a progression in three stages: first, the early nineteenth century rule that employees usually owned the entire right to their inventions; second, the later nineteenth century rule that employees owned their inventions but employers often had a license to use them; and third, the twentieth century rule that employers own most employee inventions. The patent law both reflected and reinforced the notion of invention as a product of individual genius. Although the use of express and implied contract concepts to allocate invention rights increased at the turn of the century, it was not a completely new practice.

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