Quality over Quantity? The Value of English Patents during the Industrial Revolution (1700-1850)

Patent records provide one of the most reliable and complete data sources to study technological dynamics during the British Industrial Revolution. Still, patents widely differ in their importance and simple patent counts are problematic indicators of innovative activities. In this essay, we develop a new composite indicator of patent value during the Industrial Revolution. We combine three quality proxies based on the relative "visibility" of patents in bibliographic sources. We consider both references in specialized literature contemporary to the patents, as summarized in Woodcroft's Reference Index, and a newly collected database of mentions in modern reference texts of history of technology and specialized biographical dictionaries. The resulting indicator is a robust proxy for the value of patents and it allows us to analyse the characteristics of high quality patents. In addition, our newly developed indicator offers a way to investigate the different processes governing the arrival of major technological breakthroughs (macroinvention) vis-à-vis more incremental improvements (microinventions). We find confirmation that the two types of inventions are governed by different laws and that macroinventions tend to present a labour-saving bias, while microinventions mainly reduce the need of capital. We end by reconciling these findings with the insights of Innovation Studies and we suggest that a renewed interest in the dynamics of early mechanization can help shedding new light on the debate about the Industrial Revolution