Going for Gold. Industrial Fairs and Innovation in the Nineteenth-Century United States

This paper compares the award of prizes to innovation in the patent system. The data set comprises a sample of exhibits and premiums at industrial fairs sponsored by the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, between 1837 and 1874. The results shed light on the factors that influenced whether specific inventions and inventors attempted to appropriate returns through the protection of intellectual property rights, or through alternative institutions. Prize winners tended to belong to more privileged classes than the general population of patentees, as gauged by the wealth and occupation of inventors at the exhibition. Moreover, the award of prizes was less systematic than that of patents, and unrelated to such proxies for the productivity of the innovation as inventive capital or the commercial success of the invention.