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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2008

"An Eye for An Optical Theory"

Résumé

The story has been told many times: during the second half of the 18th century, in Paris as well as in London, guilds ceased to be relevant in terms of technical knowledge and improvements (if ever were), while patent legislation gave innovators individual rights to balance costs of innovation. Christine MacLeod stressed how patenting could be part of an entrepreneurial strategy to escape from guild regulations, using Dollond's patent for telescopes as typical.
But if guilds lose their jurisdiction settle trade litigation, and litigation becomes public, who detain jurisdiction for litigation between tradesmen about innovation ? Do scientists, or judges have jurisdiction on inventors ? We know that trade experts appear. But how ? Asking this question also supposes to step aside from the classic account of technical progress by inventors, and to look at expertise by the side, and to dump the idea of inventors as trading inventions or science.
The idea is dumped because, in this paper, we consider expertise as part of a professionnalization process: within the trade of opticians some tradesmen became inventors, or improvers, while others just sold spectacles; some appear as professionals, and some have been seen as scientists. And all can pretend somehow being experts. Beside, historians of the inventive activity have shown, the importance of inventors' networks, linking inventors to scientists, to manufacturers and financial interests in the c1700-c1820 period. But, as well as inventions ask for expertise to determine the legitimacy of inventors' claims, history of industralization can use expertise on optical manufacturing as a observatory to look on technical and organizational changes. Experts and expertise are embedded in the process and networks of the inventive activity. Of course, a capital city is a topos for expertise, because opportunity for such translations is only possible where technical, administrative and scientific interests can meet.
This paper examines first how a patent litigation surprisingly did arise a collective trade interest in Restauration Paris, opposing experts' opinions. Then a parallel case, in mid-18th c. London, is reported , in order to understand what did “decaying” guilds do. Finally we have a look on the State and scientific expertise in the improvement of Paris optical manufacture: we will see its ability to link trade to science and to state policy, and its inability to place optical manufacturing into a scientific or political "centre of calculation".
As Peter Greenaway's Draughtsman's contract, this paper tells stories about the power and failure of outsider's expertise, about an expert labour blurring – temporary – frontiers between trade, science and law, about the misuse of partnerships and the legitimacy of expert labourer to claim some property: opticians, manufacturer or inventors, cannot be understood without a network of contractual ties within the trade, and relationships with scientists outside the trade. This does not mean opticians are scientists or lawyers, but that some translation, ie the process of expertise – institutionalized or not – prepares and/or reveals the trade's evolutions.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00005174 , version 1 (02-11-2005)
halshs-00005174 , version 2 (19-10-2006)
halshs-00005174 , version 3 (11-11-2008)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00005174 , version 3

Citer

Stéphane Buzzi. "An Eye for An Optical Theory": Science, trade and expertise in optical manufacture
(Paris and London, c1760-c1830). 2008. ⟨halshs-00005174v3⟩
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