How patents became documents, or dreaming of technoscientific order, 1895-1937

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2018-0193
Date13 May 2019
Published date13 May 2019
Pages577-592
AuthorEva Hemmungs Wirtén
Subject MatterLibrary & information science
How patents became documents,
or dreaming of technoscientific
order, 1895-1937
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
Department of Social Change and Culture, Tema Kultur och samhälle,
Norrköping, Sweden
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show how the documentation movement associated with the
utopian thinkers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine relied on patent offices as well as the documents most
closely associated with this institutional setting the patents themselves as central to the formation of the
document category. The main argument is that patents not only were subjected to and helped construct, but
also in fact engineered the development of technoscientific order during 18951937.
Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on an interdisciplinary approach to intellectual
property, document theory and insights from media archeology. Focused on the historical period 18951937,
this study allows for an analysis that encapsulates and accounts for change in a numberof comparative areas,
moving from bibliography to documentation and from scientific to technoscientific order. Primary sources
include Paul Otlets own writings, relevant contemporary sources from the French documentation movement
and the Congrès Mondial de la documentation universelle in 1937.
Findings By understanding patent offices and patents as main drivers behind those processes of sorting
and classification that constitute technoscientific order, this explorative paper provides a new analytical
framework for the study of intellectual property in relation to the history of information and documentation.
It argues that the idea of the document may serve to rethink the role of the patent in technoscience, offering
suggestions for new and underexplored venues of research in the nexus of several overlapping research
fields, from law to information studies.
Originality/value Debates over the legitimacy and rationale of intellectual property have raged for many
years without signs of abating. Universities, research centers, policy makers, editors and scholars, research
funders, governments, libraries and archives all have things to say on the legitimacy of the patent system, its
relation to innovation and the appropriate role of intellectual property in research and science, milieusthat are
of central importance in the knowledge-based economy. The value of this paper lies in proposing a new
way to approach patents that could show a way out of the current analytical gridlock of either/or that for
many years has earmarked the openness-enclosuredichotomy. The combination of intellectual property
scholarship and documentation theory provides important new insight into the historical networks and
processes by which patents and documents have consolidated and converged during the twentieth century.
Keywords Classification, Patents, Patent offices, Technoscience, Paul Otlet
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Toward the end of 1937, Paul Otlet (1868-1944), a man who since 1895 had a finger in almost
all European initiatives regarding information and documentation, commissioned the image
featured below, document 8694 or Laboratorium Mundaneum,from the illustrator
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 75 No. 3, 2019
pp. 577-592
Emerald Limited Publishing
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-11-2018-0193
Received 22 November 2018
Revised 19 December 2018
Accepted 27 December 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
© Eva Hemmungs Wirtén. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under
the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate
and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject
to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at
http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
This researchwas funded by a grant from the European ResearchCouncil (ERC) under the European
Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 741095-PASSIM-
ERC-2016-AdG). The author wishes to thank José Bellido, Henrique Carvalho, Björn Hammarfelt,
Hyo Yoon Kang, Annika Olsson, Danilo Mandic, Per Wirtén and Martin Zeiliger for comments on an
earlier version of this text.
577
Dreaming of
technoscientific
order
Constantin Platounoff. As opposed to the relative anonymity that continues to surround his
longstanding collaborator Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943), Otlet has catapulted into fame as a
forefather of the internet, the posterchild of a lesser-known European proto-internet history
(Levie, 2008; Wright, 2014).
In large part, Otlet finds himself in this position less because of what he wrote and more
becauseofwhathedrew.Hisimagesofplanetary interconnectedness by way of machines,
knowledge and information feel eerily clairvoyant. Yet, it was not unusual for Otlet to ask a
professional to execute his vision and give his sketchy and almost childlike doodling a more
polished form. Document 8694 is no exception. But what exactly do we see? (Figure 1). First,
perhaps an enormous black monolith, similar to, if not an exact replica of, a Bessemer
converter[1]. Henry Bessemers innovation made steel out of iron and the process (covered
by an impressive number of patents) proved of watershed importance in the history of
industrialization. But the buckets attached to the ropeway conveyors in document 8694 carry
Figure 1.
Laboratorium
Mundaneum:
powerhouse of
documentation.
[December 28, 1937]
(Mons, Mundaneum
EUM 8694©)
578
JD
75,3

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