Ascertaining whether patents encourage invention necessitates understanding the incentives inventors respond to. The … British patent system prior to its reform in 1852 was cumbersome and expensive. Whether it facilitated or delayed the … Industrial Revolution is hotly debated. This paper's contribution is to examine the incentives to patent, and the characteristics …

to patent. Our study records how brewery innovators pursued a wide variety of highly distinct appropriability strategies … strategies could co-exist, although some brewery insiders maintaineda suspicion of the promoters of patent technologies which … could support trade in inventions even without the use of the patent system. …