The Vieille-Montagne patents

In focusing on the case study of the zinc industry, and most particularly on the history of the Vieille-Montagne company from 1837 to 1873, Arnaud Péters is trying to clarify the link between industrial innovation and patenting activity. He backs up his quantitative analysis with a technical analysis, made possible thanks to a documentation that is unusually rich; the archives of the company, “Mines et fonderies de zinc” of Vieille-Montagne, the first multinational company in Europe and the most important company in the Belgian zinc industry. The archives altered the focus of Péters’ research, by providing material for a case study. The archives allowed him to examine and study many patents, but also to get to know many actors in the national and international industrial system “The idea was not to be satisfied with the systematic approach, which is too general and which by itself does not allow us to understand the mechanism of innovation. Thus I have conducted an analysis of each patent that had anything to do with zinc, and then tried to understand how these patents were used and assigned worth in factories”.

In the zinc industry, the use of patents is symptomatic. The in-depth study of patents allowed Arnaud Péters to show that there are multiple uses for patents.

As mentioned above, some patents are used as advertising. To hold a patent was a mark of prestige that benefited inventors, giving them a certain aura. This kind of use for a patent is not of great economic interest, and the patents involved rarely serve any important purpose in industry.

Other patents have a strategic purpose. Vielle-Montagne was the source of many types of industrial pollution, and during the second half of the 19th century the authorities were putting pressure on the company to do something about it. In order to improve its public image, the company invested in research to try to find processes that produced less pollution. However, patents in this area were quickly abandoned. Although the pollution problems were still around, the company stopped investing in pollution control, apparently hoping the initial effort into industrial processes that might produce less pollution would be enough to improve the company’s image.

Patents also are part of what we could call indirect application: competitive situation analysis. From  the 1840's and 1850's, Vieille-Montagne practiced an early form of technological monitoring. The directors of the factories regularly sent engineers to Brussels so they could read the patents applied for by their competitors. The company archives have documents referring to many of the inventions that appeared in the 19^th century, which are commented on or criticized by these engineers. Thus, competitors’ patents were a valuable form of research and a stimulus to inventors. This example appears to show that patents contribute to the process of invention, but the case of technological monitoring is still an exception with regard to that time period, and remains marginal.

Patents that determine the direction of an industry are rare, but there are some examples of success. In the zinc industry, there were a half-dozen patents that had significant economic impact. These patents are called “monopolistic”, and they allow the patent holder to enjoy a technological advantage. Whether the matter of a patent passed into general practice in an industry or was a simple failure, patents are still very interesting, in the opinion of Arnaud Péters:  “The purpose of my research was not to give an account of important patents that appeared during the 19^th century but to offer a holistic concept of innovation, that is, by describing failures as well as successes. The technical value of patents is very uncertain, but they all teach us something about industrial problems in the 19th century”.