A Brill Calendar: August 22

Few stages in the growth of knowledge generally have been as crucial as the one experienced by Renaissance Europe in the 15th century, when Gutenberg’s press and Columbus’s ships started to transform the medieval world beyond recognition.

There is, however, another major, unprecedented and novel component hailing from the same age and continent: the ‘Patent of Invention’, namely the granting of specified rights and privileges to inventors by a monarch or a government. A special document sealed in such a way that its contents could be read without damaging the correspondence-seal was called a ‘letter patent’ and entailed government protection.

The mercantile city-states of Florence and Venice were the cradle of this sophisticated innovation, opening up a new chapter in the old book of Roman and European property law. In importance, this innovation was comparable to the earlier use of double-entry book-keeping (which hailed from the same European region). The history of the administrative and bureaucratic measures needed to protect intellectual property as well as the interests of a society is difficult to read and understand; and it is seldom that a new patent attracts vivid attention. In most cases it expires as unobtrusively as it was granted, while their economic value tends to evaporate.

The patent issued to the German inventor Paul Gottlieb Nipkow (Lauenburg, Pomerania, August 22 1860 – Berlin, August 24 1940) for a rotating disk with apertures is typical. This earliest predecessor of television uses - as the first contraption to do so - a scanning principle, but still without the (crucial) support of electronics. Nipkow called his invention the ‘electrical telescope’. The disk died with its creator; the Nazi effort during the Olympic Games to transform the device born in 1884 – half a century later – into a convincing proof of ‘Deutschtum’ was an object of ridicule at the expense of an aged gentleman-inventor.