On the manufacture of chlorine : a lecture, delivered, at the request of the Council of the Society of Arts, before the Chemical Section of that Society, May 22nd, 1874, A.W. Williamson ... in the chair / by Walter Weldon.

  • Weldon, Walter, 1832-1885.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the manufacture of chlorine : a lecture, delivered, at the request of the Council of the Society of Arts, before the Chemical Section of that Society, May 22nd, 1874, A.W. Williamson ... in the chair / by Walter Weldon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    which a poet expends in embodying his conceptions in verse, is a result which is usually only attainable by the expenditure upon an idea, or upon a set of ideas, not only of immense labour, but also of an amount of money frequently equal to the value of a very large real estate. Inventors are usually poor men, and I am not concei'ned that they should be enabled to clothe themselves in fine raiment and fare sumptuously every day; but it is surely of the utmost importance that there should continue to exist some means of enabling them to do their special work; and it is obvious that nothing which has as yet been proposed instead of it could be so effective to that end as the system which gives to the inventor a temporary property in his ideas, and thus enables him to tempt the capitalist to supply him with the means of endeavouring to carry them into practice. If the endeavour is successful, the capitalist of course takes the lion's share of that portion of the profits which ought to constitute the inven- tor's reward; but he at least enables the result to be achieved, and that is the main thing. In the case of a process like my own, too, even if it had been invented by a rich manufacturer, he would not have worked it out if he could not have patented it; because by so doing he would simply have placed himself at a disadvantage as compared with his competitors in the trade, all of whom would have shared with him the advantages of his invention, —seeing that he could not possibly have kept it secret,— while the cost of its realization would have had to be borne by himself alone. This illustration of the influence of the patent system in promoting industrial invention seemed to arise so naturally out of the subject of this lecture that I could not forbear submitting it to you ; and I have now only to apologize for having occupied you so long, and to express my regret that I have not been able to make my subject moi-e interesting to you.