Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State

>> Niall Ferguson: Good afternoon. It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to the latest seminar in our series at the Applied History Working Group. I'm speaking not only to the people in this room, in the Schultz Building, but also to the people who are joining over Zoom. And we'll be making sure that we don't forget about you.

 

Though we can't see you, this is going to be a presentation that really fits the bill of Applied history. Analog superpowers, how 20th century technology theft Built the National Security State is the new book just out in October by this body's great friend, Kate Epstein. Kate has been a professor at Rutgers, Camden, the less radical campus, I'm told, since 2011.

 

She's a PhD from Ohio State. Before that was Cambridge and before that, Yale. And this is the second book because her first book, Torpedo Inventing the Military Industrial Complex, was published by Harvard just 10 years ago. So 2034 will be the next book. Cate will be timing you.

 

I'm going to quote from a Wall Street Journal piece that you wrote a while ago, which seems to set the scene rather nicely. A century ago, the US Was the China of the age, an up and coming revisionist nation chafing against the established powers. Importing and pirating what it could free riding on the security provided by the existing hegemon and legitimizing its behavior with the pious conviction that it was on the right side of history.

 

Could it be that the Chinese understand US History better than Americans do? Resonated with this British historian. We're excited to have you here, Cate. You're going to present for just over half an hour with some slides which we hope will appear on the screen. And after that, we incredibly fortunate to have Jim Ellis here to offer some expert commentary.

 

He's our Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow, but somewhat more impressively, a retired four star admiral and former Commander of United States Strategic Command. So if anybody knows about the issues of technology and military competition, it's got to be Jim. He also had a stint as a director at Lockheed Martin before that.

 

Early on, this always impresses me, he was a Navy fighter pilot and that's something that's so unimaginably hard for me to imagine doing that. It gets me really quite awestruck.

>> James O. Ellis Jr.: I can't hold a jar. That's what I heard.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to comment.

 

And then after Jim's spoken, we'll open it up to general discussion with that. Kate, the floor is yours.

>> Kate Epstein: All right, thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you to Neil for the invitation, to Admiral Ellis for agreeing to comment, and to Joseph and Amber for helping arrange everything.

 

I thought I would begin by explaining why, even though my book is a work of history about a seemingly arcane topic, it actually offers perspective on some very contemporary issues, ranging from geopolitics to intellectual property. So doubtless you are aware, for instance, that the United States is attempting to restrict the export of semiconductors to China, and it accuses China, accurately, of working to steal foreign intellectual property, or IP.

 

But geopolitical tensions over computing technology aren't unprecedented, as my book shows, and China isn't the first country in history to steal foreign IP. To put it bluntly, in the Wall Street Journal piece that I wrote, kinda make this argument as well. My book argues that the United States was The China of 100 years ago, quote, cheating and hacking and stealing its way to global superpower status.

 

To borrow Secretary of State Marco Rubio's words from his recent confirmation hearing, but doing so at Britain's rather than the United its own expense. Another issue that's been in the news the past few years, but especially since President Trump took office, is the Pentagon's effort to reform its contract and perennial effort to reform its contracting so as to entice more Silicon Valley firms to enter the defense business as it seeks to update its arsenal for an era of unmanned systems and AI.

 

Like defense contractors throughout history, Silicon Valley firms are learning that the government can be a nightmare customer. For instance, the government typically demands data rights from its contractors, which can range from technical data like engineering drawings to patented knowledge. At the most extreme, the government can demand the right to do anything it wants with the data, including sharing it with a firm's competitors.

 

The government does this to avoid what it calls Benderlock, which is the new jargon for monopoly. But as you can imagine, the prospect of the government taking patented knowledge and sharing it with competitors disincentivizes firms from taking government contracts. As executives from Palantir and another Silicon Valley firm put it in an article, the result of the government's insistence on wide ranging data rights is that, quote, software providers eager to support the Department of Defense risk losing the very assets that sustain their business company intellectual property.

 

This not only dissuades commercial technology providers from seeking government contracts, it places a particularly onerous burden on younger, non traditional tech firms that are hoping to break into the defense industrial ecosystem, both of which limit the public private partnerships necessary to ensure that the United States stays ahead of technologically advanced competitors.

 

Another fun thing the government can do to destroy the value of defense contractors. IP is to slap secrecy orders on patent applications, which prevents patents prevents applications from actually issuing as patents while contractors can sue for damages. In such instances, they may find that the government refuses to turn over evidence that they would need to prove loss on the grounds that disclosing the evidence would endanger state secrets.

 

That privilege is known as the state secrets privilege, which was established in the 1953 Supreme Court case known as USB Reynolds, and the courts have upheld its use in invention secrecy cases What I hope to convey in my remarks today, as in my book, is that none of this is new.

 

Strange as it may sound, the history of British and U.S attempts to procure cutting edge naval technology in the early 20th century, offers valuable historical perspective on very contemporary issues in Sino US Relations and with Silicon Valley. My book follows a cluster of inventions for aiming the big guns of battleships from Britain to the United States in roughly the first half of the 20th century.

 

The core inventions that I trace in the book were made by these two Englishmen Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood in the roughly 13 years before World War I. Both were civilians at the time. Isherwood is shown in a naval uniform because he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War I.

 

At the heart of Pollen's and Isherwood's system was an extraordinarily sophisticated analog computer. For those of you who haven't heard the term, as I had not before starting this project, analog computers get their name from the fact that they set up mechanical or electrical analogs to physical problems.

 

That is, they represent quantities in direct proportion to their original values, whereas digital computers represent quantities as digits, typically ones and zeros. Pollen's initial WOOD system was known as a fire control system, which does not mean firefighting, which is what I thought the first time I heard the term, but refers to controlling the gunfire of ships, so hence fire control.

 

Now, their system may sound like a sort of gee whiz curiosity from a bygone age, but in fact, it represented a huge technological breakthrough and a landmark in computing history. Paul and Isherwood did not make some minor improvement to a trivial weapons system. They made a quantum leap in improving the ability of the primary weapon system of the primary instrument of combat power, in the world at the time.

 

Before the advent of the air age and the missile age, battleships were nation's principal means for projecting combat power on and across the world's oceans. And each ship cost millions of dollars. So improving the ability of their guns to actually hit their targets was a big deal. Powell's and Isherwood's invention represented the cutting edge of defense technology in its day, much as semiconductors and AI do today.

 

Just like these modern technologies, Pollan and Isherwood intended their system to enable smart networked warfare in which machines displaced human beings. They were decades ahead of their time, and for reasons I'll explain, their invention was as legally and diplomatically significant as it was technologically and geopolitically significant. Now, of course, Pollen and Isherwood had no idea that they were gonna invent something so important when they began their work, all they were trying to do was to solve an emerging problem in naval gunnery.

 

Until the late 19th century, aiming a battleship's guns was fairly straightforward. Ships moved slowly and expected ranges were under 2,000 yards. So essentially, just laid your guns flat to the surface of the ocean, waited for the right point in the war, and fired at point-blank range. But by the late 19th century, ship speeds were increasing, guns were able to fire farther, and the Royal Navy got interested in being able to hit at longer ranges.

 

Now the firing ship had to fire its shell on an arc and lead the ship it was aiming at if it wanted to make a hit. In other words, the firing ship needed to be able to make prediction about where the target was going to be at some future point in time.

 

When in 1901, Pollen and Isherwood began to analyze mathematics of the relative movement of two ships, they immediately realized that the prediction problem required calculus, not algebra. Without going into too much detail, which I would be happy to go into, but I'm going to spare you, they determined that the range and the bearing, that is, the distance and the angle between two moving shifts, changed at changing rates, known as the range and bearing rates, rather than at constant rates.

 

The fact that the range and bearing rates were changing moved the fire control problem out of the world of basic algebra and into the world of calculus, whose differentials and integrals deal with instantaneous and infinite changes rather than constant change. In addition to the need for calculus, Pollen and Isherwood have three other insights when they studied the mathematics of the fire control problem, which helped to explain why their invention was so pioneering.

 

One was that the range rate changed with the bearing rate, so that if they wanted to reproduce the infinitely and instantaneously changing bearing rate, range rate, excuse me. They would have to interconnect it with the infinitely and instantaneously changing bearing rate. This is great for cocktail parties, by the way.

 

The interconnection of the range and bearing rate was what made Pollens and Isherwood's computer a form of AI in the eyes of their contemporaries, because it was able to go on generating accurate predictions without manual intervention by human beings. People at the time didn't use the phrase artificial intelligence.

 

Instead, they called Pollen's and Isherwood's computer, quote, a mechanical brain or a machine that uses intelligence. The second key insight that Pollen and Isherwood had was that they could use gyroscopes to provide a stable line against which they could take the accurate bearing readings that they would need to calculate the bearing rate.

 

Without a gyroscope, the readings would be corrupted by the effect of yaw, which this slide illustrates. And I actually brought a crop to help illustrate this point. Pardon me for just a second, while-

>> Niall Ferguson: It's good that we-

>> Kate Epstein: Yeah, so this is a pirate ship bass toy.

 

Looks a little like you, Neil. And so basically, yaw is the kind of corkscrewing motion that a ship makes as it moves through the water. The other two motions that a ship makes are pitch which is the forward and back, and the roll, which is the side to side.

 

All of these actually mess with your gunnery in various ways. But the one that Pollen and Isherwood wanted to tackle first. Now, I'll just leave this adorable, serious naval gunnery prop there. The one that they wanted to tackle first was stabilizing for the true line of bearing against yawning.

 

Now, that realization that they would need gyro stabilization made them enthusiastic early adopters of gyroscopes long before they were used in the Norden bomb site or in the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles. Finally, Pollen and Isherwood saw that the accuracy of their computers calculations would be degraded by any time lag in the transmission of data to or from it, which made them very interested in telecommunications.

 

In effect, they envisioned creating a shipboard intranet. This at the same time that the so called Victorian Internet of undersea cables and radio was encircling the globe. Their intranet, they hoped, would enable the sort of smart networked precision warfare that has dominated combat since the digital computing revolution.

 

In effect, they were offering the British Admiralty what is known in US defense lore as the second offset. The Pentagon's incorporation of microelectronics beginning in the 1970s to enable smart precision strike capabilities. Now, Pollen and Isherwood had conceptualized most of this by the end of 1901 and all of it by the end of 1904 at the latest, before they had official help from the Admiralty.

 

But they had no hardware or reduction of their ideas to physical form to match the mathematical analysis that would be encoded into the design of their system, or what we might call their analog software. They would have to cross what is known in contemporary acquisition. And parlance as the valley of death between a good idea and a functioning product.

 

To cross the valley, they needed the Admiralty's help. For various reasons, they couldn't raise venture capital in normal ways, mainly secrecy. But this raised hugely complicated IP issues. The normal way for inventors to protect their IP was to take out patents, but for complicated reasons. I won't go into here.

 

I'm happy to talk more about in Q and A. Pollard and Isherwood did not believe that patents would offer them sufficient protection. So instead of patents, they looked to what would now be called a development contract with the Admiralty, except that that term didn't exist at the time because the development contract was so unusual.

 

The British government, for good reasons, was in the business of buying finished products, not funding R and D. In fact, no less a figure than Alexander Graham Bell had been turned down for a development contract by the British Post Office. Although the Admiralty was equally uncomfortable with the idea, the support of the Navy's principal gunnery experts persuaded it to take the plunge and agree to a development contract with pollen in 1906.

 

The key aspect of this contract was that the Admiralty agreed to define the scope of Pollen's initial Woods IP more broadly than they could through the patent system. But the Admiralty did not honor the contract. Instead, as Pollan and Isherwood developed their system, the Admiralty constantly sought to reduce the scope of their IP to what was patented or patentable.

 

The main reason the Admiralty did so, aside from trying to reduce its financial liability, was that it was secretly supporting the development of a rival system by a naval officer named Frederick Dreyer, who had access to information about Pollen System by virtue of his insider position. But because Dreier didn't fully understand the conceptualization of the Pollen Insharwood system, its software, so to speak, the hardware of his system lacked the same functionality as theirs.

 

What made the hardware of their system so extraordinary for the time was the way they improved on an existing technology known as mechanical integrators, which were like the semiconductors of digital computers, and that they were what gave analog computers their processing power. Integrators were mechanical devices for solving differential and integral equations in calculus.

 

The most famous integrator of the day had been invented by Lord Kelvin for his famous harmonic analyzer, used for predicting the tides and widely regarded as a landmark in computer history. Isherwood, who was the engineer of the Pollen Isherwood pair, Isherwood overhauled Kelvin's design to overcome certain flaws in it.

 

And you can see from the diagram of Isherwood's design compared to Kelvin's design just how much more complex Isherwood's design was without me even explaining the differences, which I'm happy to do now. Isherwood interconnected four of these new integrators so as to create something like a mechanical integrating circuit.

 

To borrow a term from modern digital computers, it was extraordinarily sophisticated for the analog era. Although Dreier's design wasn't nearly sophisticated, he and a clique of his supporters persuaded the Admiralty to adopt his system over of Pollen's, against the objections of a majority of disinterested gunnery officers. The Admiralty's decision not to adopt Pollen's system should have freed him, Isherwood to sell it abroad.

 

But instead, when Pollan told the Admiralty of his plans to sell abroad in 1913, the Admiralty threatened him with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, first passed in 1889 and revised in 1911, and a precursor to the US Espionage Act of 1917. Although the Espionage act had been passed in response to spy scares, not to regulate the global arms market, the Admiralty saw that it could be used as improvised export control legislation because of how it criminalized the unauthorized transmission of information.

 

Now, initially, the Admiralty deployed the Official Secrets act on the liberal grounds of property rights, arguing that it had the right to demand secrecy because Pollan had acquired the knowledge that he needed to build his system from the Navy. But when Pollen was able to show from the documentary record that it was actually the other way around and that the Admiralty had acquired the knowledge it needed to build its system from Pollen, the Admiralty changed its grounds of argument, claiming instead that Pollan must keep his system secret regardless of whether he or the Admiralty owned the underlying intellectual property.

 

That severance of the Official Secrets act from liberal norms of property was illegal, according not only to Pollan's lawyers, but also to the Admiralties. In the book, I argue that the Admiralty's use of the Official Secrets Act anticipated the famous Bourne Secret provision of the US Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which held that nuclear knowledge was, quote, unquote, born secret.

 

And I document a similar use of the US espionage act against a civilian inventor by the US government in the 1920s. Saying that something is born secret is a way of saying that it doesn't matter whether the parent is the government or the private sector. The government gets legal guardianship regardless.

 

Accordingly, while many historians see US nuclear secrecy as the start of a new story in the history of government secrecy, I argue that it was just as much a new chapter in an old story. One that didn't originate in the mid 20th century United States, but actually reached back to 19th century Britain.

 

Now Pollan decided to call the Admiralty's bluff and proceed with foreign sales of his system, which set the stage for the second theft, this time by the US Navy. Much like Dreyer, the British naval officer, a US Defense contractor who hadn't been working on a fire control computer at all started working on one as soon as the US Navy acquired information about Pollens.

 

Then US Naval officers, after originally believing that they could compute accurate predictions about the target location with the range rate alone, they realized that the range rate had to be interconnected with the bearing rate. That's math, you would think it would be obvious, but actually both Dreier and the US Navy initially made the same mistake of not realizing that you had to interconnect the rates.

 

And if you study the patents, it's clear that the American engineer who designed the pirated American computer whose name was Hannibal Ford, that he took inspiration from Isherwood's design. Now, although I don't generally believe in smoking guns in history, I think I found about as close to a smoking gun of American piracy as one can get.

 

This is a memorandum by Wilbur Van Auken, the officer in charge of fire control at the Navy Department, recording that he directed Hannibal Ford, the contractor who built the American computer, to incorporate the bearing rate feature. Van Alkin acknowledged that the government, quote, will have to pay for this, of course, after the war.

 

Now, Van Aukin's request to Ford to incorporate the bearing rate feature is why Ford's firm, the Ford Instrument Company, requested and received an indemnification from the US Navy in the event that Paul and Anusha would suit it for patent infringement. Which was signed by then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, which I think is what you might call on the nose.

 

Now, there's a lot that I cover after that which I'll. I'm going to have to skip for the sake of time. But just to give you a sense of kind of the scope of the issues that the book discusses, which range from kind of naval history to legal history, and business history, and diplomatic history.

 

These are just whoopsies, I might. Did I not put in that slide? I'm so sorry. I had a slide with the list, so I will just read the list out. These are some of the other things that the book discusses. The development of US Patent secrecy, which is as much a contradiction in terms as it sounds.

 

The corporate culture of patenting incremental improvements to fundamental foreign inventions by the ostensibly very innovative Sperry Gyroscope company and its spinoffs. The US Government's use of eminent domain to take patents under the fifth Amendment of the Constitution. A really fascinating story. The US Navy's pursuit of British naval technology, not just pollen's initial woods invention during World War I polls.

 

And Issuerwood's successful attempt to recover compensation for the theft of their system in Britain, which forms a really interesting compare and contrast to the American story. And also how patents structured the US Fire control industry. Spoiler alert, they structured it pervasively. But since I don't have time to discuss everything, I want to fast forward to the end of the book so that I can get to the denouement of the Pylan Isherwood story in America and end where I began.

 

In 1936, Pollan and Isherwood decided to sue the US government for infringing their American patents by procuring the Ford computer. In order to be able to prove their case, Pollan and Isherwood asked the Court of Claims, the court, where he went, to sue the government, to order discovery, that is, to order the US Government to make certain evidence available to them.

 

The government refused, asserting what would become known as the state secrets privilege. It claimed that US Fire control technology was highly secret and that disclosing information about it in judicial proceedings would endanger national security. Now, it was true that fire control technology was highly secret. It was also true that the Navy, by its own admission, owed Pollan and Usherwood money for what it had taken from them.

 

But the Navy hid evidence of culpability from the Justice Department lawyers responsible for presenting the government's case and pushed the government to argue on secrecy grounds, which would have the effect of covering up the Navy's piracy. The man whom the Navy and the Justice Department decided to send to the pivotal Court of Claims hearing on the government's assertion of the secrecy privilege was this man, Captain Robert Lavender.

 

Now, Lavender was a Naval Academy grad who developed expertise in radio. And since radio development involved huge IP battles, the Navy decided to send him to get a law degree, and he soon became the Navy's leading patent expert. Now he's one of these kind of like, fascinating and important figures who's been lost to history.

 

In 1941, when the Office of Scientific Research and Development was established, its director, Vannevar Bush, would request that Lavender be assigned as his patent advisor. As the chief patent advisor to osrd, Lavender became the chief patent advisor to the Manhattan Project, which extensively used secret patents. So Lavender quite literally embodied the links between an atomic secrecy regime and an older secrecy regime rooted in naval contracting, which again, is part of why I think it's a mistake to see nuclear secrecy as something unprecedented.

 

Now, the Court of Claims decided to uphold the government's assertion of the secrecy privilege over the objections of Pollan's initial Wood's lawyer, that doing so violated their right to due process, negated the property right in patents, and violated the separation of powers by allowing the executive branch to usurp judicial prerogatives.

 

In other words, he argued that the case raised fundamental political economic questions. But the court rejected his arguments. There's the slide. Sorry about that. Put them in the wrong order. The court reasoned that the State Secrets privilege, quote, is predicated upon the principle of the public good and the right of the sovereign to maintain an efficient national defense.

 

A public interest of such paramount importance as in and of itself transcends the individual interests of a private citizen. It added that the presumption obtains that in the exercise of the authority, good faith will characterize the conduct of government officials. Now, that presumption was no doubt administratively necessary, but it was also misplaced in this case, as we've seen.

 

And there soon developed further evidence of just how misplaced it was. Since the effect of the Court of Claims ruling was to prevent Pollan and Isherwood from accessing evidence, they decided to try suing Ford Instrument in District Court, a different jurisdiction, to get evidence there. But the government successfully attached itself as a party to the suit and again successfully asserted the State secrets privilege.

 

And that is how Pollan's initial Wood's attempts to recover compensation for the US Theft of their system ended up as one of five cases cited as precedent in a key footnote of the Supreme Court's seminal ruling on the State secrets privilege in US V Reynolds in 1953. So the Paul and Isherwood story isn't some random case, but actually a highly important one by multiple metrics.

 

Now, these two US lawsuits by The Englishman, Pollan and Isherwood, one against the US Government and one against Ford Instrument, were going on. When Britain and the United States decided to kickstart scientific and technological cooperation after the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, Britain sent over a mission under the leadership of the distinguished scientific administrator, Sir Henry Tizard, bearing the crown jewels of British defense innovation, most famously the Cavity Magnetron.

 

When Tizard arrived in the us, he reported in his diary that he encountered a cooperative attitude from the US Navy, except from the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, one William Furlong. Now the Bureau of Ordnance was the part of the Navy department that was responsible for fire control.

 

Furlong, back in World War I, had been posted to the Bureau of Ordnance right when it was working with Ford Instrument to incorporate the bearing rate feature from the Pollen and Isherwood computer. When Tizard struggled to get anywhere with Furlong, he asked the Chief of Naval Intelligence and Admiral Walter Anderson to see if he could find out why Furlong wasn't cooperating.

 

Anderson called Furlong in Tizard's presence, who later recorded this in his diary. They had quite a long conversation, at the end of which Admiral Anderson explained to me that the real difficulty was connected with the design of the predictor, known as the Ford predictor, so called because it predicted the target future target location.

 

It appears that an English firm, Paul and Disherwood, had sued the US Government for infringements of patents. They have been refused access to the latest US predictors for ship work and had been unable to prove their case. They had shifted their attack on Ford and were suing him.

 

It was felt by Admiral Furlong that if we had full information about the predictor, it might afterwards be said that we handed some of the information to Paul and Isherwood to enable them to fight their case. Now, Paul is Pollen. Obviously, it's just a misspelling. So what's happening here is that Furlong, who just so happens to be one of the only people with firsthand knowledge of what the Navy had done to Pollen initiate during World War I, was willing to stall an additional round of technology transfer from Britain to the United States during World War II to cover up what the Navy had done the first time around.

 

Now, one consequence of this cover up has been to obscure Pollan's and isherwood's role in US computer history. Perhaps the most powerful, if unintentional example of this obscurantism comes from the memoirs of Vannevar Bush, Robert Lavender's boss at osrd, who before the war was best. Known as co-inventor of the pioneering differential analyzer at MIT which, like Lord Coven's harmonic analyzer, is widely regarded as a landmark in computing history.

 

The differential analyzer interconnected multiple mechanical integrators, much as naval fire control computers did. In his memoirs, Bush wrote, quote, I can name an inventor who made a differential analyzer long before I did, or rather, who readily could have done so if he had put his mind to it.

 

This was Hannibal Ford. He was about as ingenious an individual as I ever heard of. He made the devices, the computers, if you will, to aim the great guns of battleships, to take into account the flight of the shell, the effect of the rotation of the earth upon its path, the air density at the time, the speed and direction of the enemy target, and so on.

 

This he did principally by interconnecting integrators. And he made a new form of integrator which could do the job, Bush concluded. Did Ford invent the differential analyzer? One can say merely that he not only could have, but he could have been the leader in the whole movement toward the modern computer if he had wanted to.

 

And the only reason he did not is probably that he did not move about in academic circles to see the need and the opportunity. I hail his memory. But of course, Bush was actually hailing Pollen's and Isherwood's memory. Now, the praise that Bush gave to Ford he could have been the leader in the whole movement toward the modern computer if he had wanted to, suggests just how extraordinary Pollen's and Isherwood's accomplishment was.

 

To reiterate, they were decades ahead of their time, and subsequent inventions in naval fire control amounted to incremental improvements on their fundamental breakthrough. US warships carried forward computers derived from Pollen's and Isherwood's work into World War II. In fact, the USS Iowa, when it was brought in for upgrades during the Cold War, was not given a new digital fire control computer because the analog fire control computer was found to be so accurate.

 

So Pollen's and Isherwood's invention deserves to be seen as a major landmark in computer history. But as I show in the book, the way they were airbrushed out of US Computing history by Bush and others was hardly unique to them. Much like China today, the United States habitually denied how much it relied on the purchase and theft of foreign technology so as to make itself appear more innovative than it was.

 

The secret sauce of Yankee ingenuity, so to speak, was the acquisition of foreign technology. And accordingly, the United States was less exceptional and more imitative. Than national mythology suggests. The fact that US technology imports of geopolitical and economic significance so often came from Britain calls into question the narrative of the special relationship between the US and Britain.

 

That narrative obscures profound tensions between the two nations in the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. US behavior toward the hegemon of its day anticipated recent Chinese behavior toward the hegemon of its day, namely the United States China. But it's boasting about innovation to the contrary is merely imitating past American practice when it imports foreign technology by fair means or foul in order to climb the global power rankings.

 

And I might add, by the way, that it's also imitating Britain, which had a horrible reputation for imitation and piracy in the 1600s. Now, in addition to these contributions, my book also offers a new account of government secrecy in Britain and the United States, the two premier champions of liberal capitalism in the modern era.

 

Consistent with their commitment to liberal capitalism, both the British and American governments have relied heavily on defense contractors in the private sector to meet their procurement needs. But contrary to liberal norms of property and market freedom, both governments invoked national security secrecy as a way to trump the IP claims of defense contractors like Pollen and Isherwood when they lacked property claims of their own.

 

They treated sensitive knowledge covered by patents as born secret, decades before the United States wrote that concept into law. In fact, my book, I think, reveals an almost entirely overlooked prehistory to the nuclear secrecy regime in late 19th and early 20th century naval defense contracting. The tension between the IP claims of defense contractors and the national security claims of the US Government is still very much with us today, shaping the burgeoning relationship between Silicon Valley and the dod.

 

Now, there's much more I could talk about, but I want to make sure that I leave time for questions. So with that, I'll stop and welcome Admiral Ellis's comments.

>> Niall Ferguson: Thank you.

>> James O. Ellis Jr.: Kate, I wasn't taking notes fast enough. You've already dealt with a lot of the issues that, that I wanted to talk about and will anyway, so don't worry about that.

 

But thank you for creating what one of your reviewers called a gripping history that spans law, international affairs, and top secret technology. To unmask the tension between intellectual property rights and national security, that's kind of the end of it. But it's the journey, the technology journey, that with which you begin, that I find so fascinating.

 

The way that you are able to bring a historical perspective and a technical perspective to something that has absolutely fascinated me as an old naval officer for. For many, many decades is wonderful. So I think also the portrayal that you did of America as a different America than the one we know today, I think is hugely important and impactful, too.

 

We're not yet the global hegemon, but a rising superpower, ready to acquire foreign technology by means fair or foul, much as we accuse China of doing today, despite our best efforts to create small yards and high fences and all the other regimes that we now see. But it's also, I think, important to note, as Kate does, that this is one phase of a long journey of technological theft and for that matter, combat or wartime military technology evolution.

 

I mean, I hate to say this amongst all the historians present, but I mean, if you want to go back to the lance being superseded by the longbow, and the longbow being superseded by gunpowder and an original Chinese invention, by the way, and then we get to the long guns that Kate talked about.

 

For those of you whose exposure to naval gunnery is limited to master and commander, I think Kate does a good job of explaining why it is much different than that and why what Paul and Initial Wood were able to create his is so absolutely remarkable because it does transcend what was done at the time.

 

And people forget that before these things arose, the shells from battleships actually had dye in the nose of the shells so that the water splash that it created if you missed allowed you to identify your shell splash as opposed to your fellow battleships show. And you could adjust fire appropriately, knowing that you weren't adjusting to the wrong impact.

 

And so it was really a fundamental, manually intensive, and very fallible process. And what they did was absolutely remarkable because as, as Kate noted, it was the bearing rates and the range rates that if you knew your own course and speed and cranked in the yaw capability and knew the bearing rate and the range rates, you could compute the course and speed of the enemy, which told you where to fire.

 

And in fact, they actually created gun-pointing mechanisms that all you had to do, all the gunner had to do, was align with what the analog computer was telling him or her, and you would hit the target, assuming the adversary had not changed course speed. So it's absolutely remarkable.

 

It's also interesting to note that the era of the long gun, despite Kate's reference to when we brought the battleship New Jersey out of mothballs for, for a brief time during the. The Reagan administration really ended in World War II as well. And it was superseded by something I'd like to talk about, which is a naval aircraft, by the way, which too were, were piloted by, by computers.

 

I had a colleague when I was a young test pilot who used to describe pilots as programmable nonlinear servo mechanisms that can be produced cheaply in nine months by unskilled labour. So place, the mechanisms that were targeting the battleship guns with a longer range capability that was obviously piloted.

 

And now we've moved beyond that as we, as we see, as, as Kate has noted, we move then from, into the, from the aircraft. The next, I guess offset, if you will, the first offset was the nuclear and, and the, the legacy of theft and piracy in that regime is absolutely extraordinary.

 

I mean, the Russians had had 10 spies that were operating at, at Los Alamos that actually allowed, as I mentioned in an address I gave a week ago today, the Russians to get the, the atomic bomb four years earlier than they would have otherwise been able to do.

 

So that was followed also by any in Pakistan who got some help, it is believed by, from the French and then A.Q. Khan started dispersing that type of technology out there and facilitated the growth and work that we now see coming out of North Korea. I won't even address where Israel may have gotten their technological assistance from, but the point is this continues.

 

Nuclear was followed by missiles which we can now track very carefully as that proliferation regime from Libya to North Korea has also benefited from the theft or the underhanded pirating of information from other entities. So this is really kind of the coin of the realm when you think about it.

 

And as we now move into the cyber and the Artificial Intelligence and the Quantum Regimes, it's going to be interesting since they in and of themselves don't make things go bang. Maybe we've seen the end of the actual kinetic piece of this, but the enablers that come with that are hugely important and Kate does a great job of setting us up for that kind of a conversation.

 

The Royal Navy concept of a captive contractor I find interesting because Kate properly alluded to that's a huge tension today in corporate America. I just aged off the lockheed board after 20 years and had the privilege of chairing the Classified Business Committee, which meant I got to go to the skunk works every year and lay hands on things that don't exist.

 

And so, but the point here is companies are now being asked to, in advance and before being awarded a contract, make sure that that intellectual property becomes government property. And as Kate indicated, so it can be shared with competitors who might be able, absent the costs of development, be able to produce those things physically at a much lower cost.

 

What's the integrity issue there? How do you monetize intellectual property? These kinds of arguments are with us now and they're beginning to color our dialogue here in the Valley. I mean, companies like Anduril are very reluctant to make this information available. And they're going so far now as to set up separate entities in other countries that are not governed by the intellectual property transfer requirements postulated in the United States, such as Australia and the like.

 

So that they can build their things there outside from that requirement to turn the intellectual property, the knowledge of how to build it over to the United States government. So again, that is an item of current and continuing interest as we know. The idea of, what do you say, born secret.

 

I'm still wrestling with that. I don't know how in the nuclear case, physics can be born secret. I mean, the laws of physics are not in danger, as many others are these days, of being repealed. And so how do you classify those things? And they've actually broadened in the intelligence world, in the classification world now, to what they call cui, which is controlled but unclassified information.

 

Which is hugely complicating the conversation in academia, for example, and in research avenues, as you try and have a conversation, at what point does the ability to assemble all these disparate entities or research elements. Perhaps under the auspices of artificial intelligence, quite frankly, and find out what then in and of itself is classified, is really confounding.

 

And we don't have an answer for that yet. And I think Kate tees up the right answers, but it's going to be a challenge that we're going to continue to confront as the years go by. The next point, I think that relates to what Kate has talked about and she indicated she's going to do another book.

 

I don't know why you keep doing these things, but she is, she won't tell me what the subject is likely to be. But I wonder, in this world of dual use technology, how do you think about classified in that context? Because now increasingly everything has a dual use.

 

Everything can be used for nefarious purposes. The technology used to launch a satellite is unclassified in many cases. I mean, we're launching CubeSats sponsored by High schools around this country these days. But if that cubesartsat is targeted at 17,000 miles an hour, which is what it orbits at, at another piece of hardware in space that you want to disable, it's no longer unclassified.

 

It's a weapon, it's an anti-satellite capability. So how do we think about those things in this world? Cate, I think, has teed up an awareness and an understanding that I think needs to be pursued. The final thing is I just love the way she writes. It's almost a dishy novel.

 

You're right, you get to know the personalities, you get to know their idiosyncrasies. None of these folks are saints. Some of them are, well, kind of like naval aviators. All of them have egos and so, and, and probably big watches as well. But nonetheless, she brings that human character to it.

 

And there's also, I hate to say this in something that's technological and historical, but there's an element of whimsy in it as well, which I get out of her chapter titles, which I love. Naval Fire Control as Beach Breeding. Westward the Course of Piracy Makes. Excuse me, Westward the Course of Piracy Makes Its Way.

 

Breaking up is Hard to Do. Clocking the Crown State Secrets on the Pax Americana and the conclusion Everything Old is New Again. So I wanna thank Cate for producing what I thought was an eminently readable and enjoyable piece. The only thing I was found, I found wanting at the end was more discussion of the translation of what she's told us about into the current world affair.

 

She's asked a lot of questions and I think it's going to be interesting to see what the implications of these are as we continue to wrestle with them in this day and age. But thank you for wonderful work and I look forward to your next one. Thanks very much, Cate.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Thanks very much. As I get to introduce the chair's prerogative and ask the first question, you point out in the book, but you didn't point it out today. The Pollen Read History at Trinity College, Oxford, how on earth does an Oxford historian make this. Quantum leaf in computing, the importance of which you certainly persuaded me of.

 

There's something really extraordinary about the career path there. How can you explain it and is it the best illustration of applied history ever?

>> Kate Epstein: Well, it's interesting, I just read an article and this is an argument I've been making for a while is that actually humanities education is actually critical for, for computer science.

 

And I actually just saw there was an article in the Times a week or two ago that Deep SEQ was actually looking to hire humanities graduates in China because they wanted more kind of creative thinking. But Pollen, he's a really interesting guy. He came from a Catholic family.

 

His father was very close with Cardinal Newman. Pollen went to the Oratory school before going to Oxford. Very artistic family, literary family, kind of not, not super wealthy but, but genteel and connected so with, with real social standing. And yeah, he read, he read history, he got some legal training which actually stood him in very good stead when it came time to negotiate these contracts.

 

And I worked as an arts critic for the Westminster Gazette. He had lots of friends in politics and he, you know, he clearly had a very powerful intellect and I think he and Isherwood were kind of a match made in heaven. So Isherwood I think was a genius and that's not my term.

 

There was a very eminent applied physicist of the day named, experimental physicist of the day named Charles Vernon Boys, who was second probably only to Kelvin in terms of kind of public standing, who called Isherwood a genius upon examining the integrator design. And so, I think Isherwood really understood the engineering.

 

But it's quite clear that Isherwood also could think in kind of big picture ways. He wasn't kind of a mere engineer. And Pollen, he was a wonderful writer. Very, very good at kind of making the case for his, the system and very good at negotiating as well. But he also, he wasn't just a kind of big picture guy.

 

He was, it's clear from like the little fragments of correspondence that are left. Unfortunately the, their corporate archive no longer exists. So it's hard to kind of get, get visibility into exactly what that relationship looks like. But it's clear from the fragments that Pollan was really also quite involved in the day to day engineering stuff.

 

So yeah, I think they just, I think in a way it probably helped Pollen that he didn't have a naval background or an engineering background because I think it gave him really fresh eyes on the problem.

>> Niall Ferguson: Amateur sailor?

>> Kate Epstein: I don't believe so, he was a hunter.

 

And I've seen a lot about. He had a collection of hunting rifles and I've seen a lot about the use of bird shooting analogies in relation to torpedo fire control and gunnery because you have to, it's like shooting into the ground. It was what they would use to refer to firing a torpedo salvo.

 

But he had a lot of cousins. He had family in both the navy and the army. And I think it just, yeah, I think he, he didn't. When naval officers studied the problem, their, their instinct was just like, let's get something rough and ready. Let's not approach the problem from the ground up.

 

Let's just make it work a little better. And there was some really valuable kind of improvements made that way. But Pollen, he was very systematic thinker. He wanted to understand this thing from the ground up. And I think that became kind of, I argue in the book that what really set him, and Isherwood apart was just the comprehensiveness of their analysis of the problem.

 

And their analysis of the problem almost dictated the solution. They certainly regarded the analysis, the definition of the problem as much more fundamental than any particular solution that they proposed, so. And they also, interestingly, they both worked at a firm called the Linotype Company which made newspaper printing equipment.

 

And I argue, I don't think anyone's ever. There's a wonderful history of Pollen and Isherwood by a historian named John Sumida. But even Sumida did not speculate that actually the Linotype, I think, may have been an inspiration for what they did. Cuz the Linotype, actually, the whole point of it was to combine and automate a bunch of different functions that had been separately performed by human beings.

 

And that's effectively what their system did. So, yeah, he's a really fascinating guy, very powerful personality who, if you look at him in different contexts, actually does not come off as well as he does in mind. But, yeah, brilliance, and he and Isherwood, I think is just serendipitous thing.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Maths teacher at the oratory school must have been very good. So there are lots of questions that I have, but I'm not going to hog the mic anymore. Norman is quick off his mark. You can raise your. The traditional way, you can raise your name card if you want to attract my attention.

 

There are the various ways you can get Joseph's attention on Zoom, and he will draw that to my attention. But Norman is first.

>> Norman Naimark: So thank you both, by the way, for terrific presentations. And for one of those historians who could not have become a computer scientist in any way, shape or form, I also appreciate, you know, your, your, the way you presented everything in comprehensible manner.

 

I did understand and so that was really, really exciting. So, I'm going to talk a little bit or ask you a little bit about this question of theft and it from a slightly different context. And so, there are really two things that stand out to me. One, having to do with the initial nuclear program in which both the Brits and the Americans, my understanding is, cooperated quite well.

 

I mean, there were initial attention, initial tensions between them, but nevertheless, the development of nuclear weapons, in other words, it's in its earliest phase, came from really, quite, quite a bit of cooperation. Does war itself being allies in war, change the sort of dynamics that you're talking about?

 

That was one thing that occurred to me. The second thing really had to do with, you know, all the, all the results of conflict with Nazi Germany. In other words, the, the, the attraction of America. And that has to do with today too, and perhaps with the defense industry earlier on in the last century.

 

Where the attraction of Silicon Valley, the attraction of the money, the attraction of the ability to do your work clear, whether it's of the Nazis in the case of many Jews. Or the Hungarians and the Hungarian Jews who came and were so crucial to the development especially of atomic weapons, but in other areas as well.

 

Does that sort of change the dynamic too? I mean, we're not just talking about theft, right? We're talking about an attraction of talent that makes it possible for this national security state to evolve. So those were the two main things. And also post-war trial Germany, where we did steal, right?

 

I mean, we went to these various locations as you know, in paperback and these other programs that grab people and grab material and grab stuff. But also they came to us, right? I mean, rather than go to the Russians. The Russians took people too. So the quest, the question there is, do these dynamics kind of change the framework in which you're placing your work?

 

Which all seems quite legitimate to me.

>> Kate Epstein: True, so on the question about does kind of like alliance change the dynamics? Yes and no. So the US sort of very ostentatiously refused to be an ally in World War I and fought as an associated power. As I say in the book, like there was, there were pressures towards cooperation on Britain and sort of giving stuff to the US during World War I because they wanted to win war.

 

But everyone is also keeping one eye on the post war world and is worried about eroding the kind of post war position. So that was kind of the counter pressure in World War II. I think, the formal alliance certainly matters, but it's not as though tensions disappear. I think there actually were continuing tensions around the nuclear sharing.

 

The Quebec agreement did, did not make the British hugely happy, as I understand it. There's a young historian named Michael Falcon who's done really good work on the way in which the Americans kind of took in cutting edge technological breakthroughs from Britain. Commercialized and mass produced it, and then refused to send the stuff back to Britain.

 

And that includes a lot of prestige technologies of the Cold War, jet engines, pharmaceuticals. So that that element of rivalry I do think continues even though there's a formal alliance. With regard your question about the attraction of talent, certainly I think there's a difference between Albert Einstein coming to the US.

 

But you can also attract talent by tempting them to bring commercial secrets with them, which the United States made a habit of doing with European artisans in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. And so if you're asking people to come, Britain did the same thing, or England did the same thing.

 

Visa be continental Europe, you can deliberately incentivize people to come to the country. And I think that's much more of a gray area than what I'm talking about. And I want to emphasize, by the way, what I'm talking about, like everyone agrees that Pollen and Isherwood did something that deserved compensation.

 

There are absolutely arguments about what's the scope of the iq, what's the nature of it, but everyone kind of Except Dreier thought they deserved some compensation. And Dreier himself, who was very eager to make IP claims on his own behalf. So they all bought into the framework that there's property and there's theft.

 

So I do think, yeah, I mean, that's definitely something different. I think when people come of their own volition, because the US is a way better option than staying in Nazi Germany, but there's also different ways there. In other instances, there are different reasons people with technical knowledge sometimes come to the US and the US Is deliberately trying to entice them to come.

 

There's also a similar to operation paperclip. The US during World War I is a great book on this by a woman named Katherine Steen, set up what they called the Alien Property Custodian. And basically, they commandeered all German and Austrian IP in the United States, and the Navy Department bought a license for like 100,000 bucks to Zeiss Telefunken, like all of the big German firms.

 

And they just got it for a song, basically. So again, that's different, you're in a war. The kind of expropriation, I think is different in that context, personally. Obviously, these are sort of subjective judgments to some degree, but it was systematic. So, yeah, so I think these are.

 

These are very complex questions, no doubt. And I think the different contexts you suggested do change to some degree, but not entirely.

>> Niall Ferguson: Did you want to jump back in?

>> James O. Ellis Jr.: I think I did. I just had a question. It's interesting. We think we know the lineage of these technologies, and you mentioned the Norden bomb site, for example.

 

But the entire Norden bombsight plan had been passed to the Germans in 1938 by an employee from the Norden company, and so they already had it. And yet when we manned up the Doolittle Raiders to launch off the Hornet to go bomb Tokyo, bomb sites have been removed for fear of them falling into other hands.

 

My question, I guess, is as we, and I'm very sensitive to your comment about analog computers, because I used one in my Aero Astro graduate work, and you said, does anybody in here know what one is? And so that, as if other things don't. That makes me feel very old.

 

But the Turing machine, for example, would that be an example of a similar iteration? Are there other technologies that you uncovered you didn't choose to pursue because they were, you know, splits off of your. Your primary theme in all of this. That might be of interest.

>> Kate Epstein: So I will say, by the way, the Norton Bombsite, I think might be my next book.

 

 

>> James O. Ellis Jr.: Okay.

>> Kate Epstein: Actually, it's very closely related technology. It's a gyroscope and analog, right?

>> James O. Ellis Jr.: And an autopilot.

>> Kate Epstein: And Pollen and Isherwood actually design for bombs. So I'm quite fascinated by that story. So Turing's computer, the bomb, and then which decoded Enigma and the Colossus.

>> James O. Ellis Jr.: This was a war changing.

 

 

>> Kate Epstein: It was. It was.

>> James O. Ellis Jr.: We broke the German.

>> Kate Epstein: Those were actually digital computers, not analog. So they're mechanical digital computers as opposed to. Well, actually, I think are electromechanical or just electrical, I can't remember, but they're actually, they come from the digital genealogy rather than the analog genealogy.

 

So I say Babbage's engines, for instance. Those are digital as well.

>> Niall Ferguson: I think Ike Fryman was next, and then Barry's Strauss.

>> Eyck Freymann: Thank you, Kay. This is a fascinating talk, and I'm looking forward to reading the book. You mentioned a number of issues in your talk, but one that you didn't mention, where I suspect you may have a view because of your past work on the torpedo, is the question of technological foresight.

 

One of the reasons that this period in naval history is so relevant to our moment is that it was dominated by figures like Jackie Fisher. Who had this uncanny ability to foresee the convergence of trends in basic technology and what they would mean for the future of naval warfare and to get ahead of these trends, the Dreadnought being one example.

 

So today in Silicon Valley, we're laboring under this assumption that the future of war will be dominated by AI and autonomy and so forth. How did the protagonists that you're writing about think computing would figure into the future of war. And how did that affect their approach to dealing with this intellectual property?

 

Possibly affecting the American's willingness to cut corners or risk complicating relationships with an important partner. In what ways were they wise and in what ways did they perhaps misunderstand the potential applications of these technologies?

>> Kate Epstein: That's a really interesting question. I would say, by the way, Fisher did not want the drone.

 

He wanted the battle cruiser. That's John Smitta's book and then supplementing it, Nick Lambert's work. I think it's crystal clear Fisher wanted the battle cruiser actually and actually had far more radical ideas about the future or than the kind of dreadnought narrative suggests. But with regard to, with regard to the foresight question.

 

So I totally agree that one of the things that makes this period so fascinating to study is like everything was changing at the same time. And so you have like the gun technologies changing, armor technologies change, ship propulsion technology is changing, communications technology is changing. The shells are changing, everything's changing.

 

So it's so difficult to figure out what combat or warfare is gonna look like in the future. Pollen and Isherwood definitely thought that the way of the future was going to be more autonomous. Pollen his one of the worst insults he could call anything was polyanthropic. So many humaned.

 

He thought that under the stress of combat, people were gonna make mistakes that machines wouldn't make. And so you needed to kind of automate and mechanize as much of the computing process as possible. Of course, remember computers could be human and were human at this point in time, much more commonly than they were considered mechanical.

 

So that was their bet. I think their bet was vindicated by World War I. I talk about the kind of conclusions reached by British gunnery officers as a result of World War I. And they basically decided to throw out Dreyer system and start afresh and basically do a much better job than Dryer had in the 1920s of plagiarizing pollen and Issuewood.

 

They do do it much more thoroughly and competently. So and they do that without admitting that's what they're doing because human beings made mistakes under the stress of combat in World War I. All of Pollan's initial expectations about the likely conditions of relative movement being very challenging from a computational perspective prove true.

 

I don't know that the like their expectations about that for Pollen and Issuerwood or for the Americans that their expectations about of the future of computing. And war really affected that much their attitudes towards IP in the book, I think I argue that what really shaped Pollan's initial Wood's approach was that they conceived of themselves as much as authors, as inventors.

 

And it's interesting, you can actually take out a copyright or a patent on software today. So it actually belongs to a literary as well as a mechanical paradigm. And so they thought of what they were doing, the kind of an, at the mathematical analysis, they thought of that as much more akin to literary creation than mechanical creation.

 

And so I think that's much more actually what shaped their conceptualization of their intellectual property. There's also a whole story about secret patents in Britain that shapes the way they approach the subject. And of course, as, as Admiral Ellis said, they've got angles as much as everyone else do.

 

They want as robust a scope as they can get. And the Admiralty always, always trying to narrow that. But an expert commission said that basically upheld Pollan's initial with conception of what they had done. And on the American side, again, I. So the kind of key American actor in my book is Elmer Sperry, the very famous American inventor, probably second only to Thomas Edison, I would say, in terms of kind of like public standing as an inventor.

 

And Sperry founded Sperry Gyroscope Company, hugely important kind of instruments making firm and supplier to the US navy. But Sperry, when he and Ford was his employee, like Carl Norton, both got their starts at Sperry Gyroscope. And Sperry's whole M.O was to basically take a fundamental foreign invention.

 

He starts with the Schlick Gyro stabilizer, which is German. He then moves to the Anchutz Gyrocompass and then he does the Pollen and Issuewood computer. He takes a fundamental foreign invention and patents incremental improvements to it and he ends it up in very protracted and famous patent litigation with Anschutz over it.

 

Einstein was actually an expert witness in it. So that was just that was his, that was the corporate culture and it wasn't specific to computing, I don't think, or about like predictions of what the war was gonna look like. It's a very American story about kind of marketing genius.

 

He was very good at creating this public image for himself as a great inventor. And my sense is that he actually wasn't a terribly talented engineer himself Ford was clearly very talented in his own right. And so that was just, that was the business model, basically. So I like I said I don't think it's specific to computing or about a sense of what warfare is going to look like.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Barry Strauss and then we've got online Norbert Holtkamp. I don't know if Norbert is going to utter his question or delegate that to me, but Barry's next.

>> Barry Strauss: Great, thank you, Kate, for an excellent presentation, Jim, for your commentary. I have a question about something that Jim mentioned at the end of his commentary and that is the implications for today.

 

 

>> Kate Epstein: Okay.

>> Barry Strauss: Now you made a point of saying the Chinese are doing in a way what the Americans did earlier. And so the suggestion I think is that America's hypocritical it in saying in making this point. But I guess maybe because I spend so much time with the Romans, I think that empires have a way of saying.

 

We did this when we were young in rogues and we're really worried about somebody else doing this and want to stop that from happening. The Romans did it to Carthage. The British were certainly not happy seeing the German Imperial Navy rise and become a threat. Couldn't you argue that from the point of the United States, all the more reason to be concerned about what China's doing.

 

 

>> Kate Epstein: Yeah, and actually I like very carefully said in my book, like I don't think as part. Specific policy recommendation follows from this. I do not think it follows that because it's hypocritical for the US to be unhappy about this, which I think it is. But A it's not at all new for nations to be hypocritical and B, even if you grant that, I don't think it follows that the United States should let China eat its lunch.

 

Still, I would prefer that the US be a little more self aware but I don't advocate throwing open the doors to US intellectual property either. And so yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's a story about this shoe being on the other foot now. I mean that's the key change I think after World War II is the US is now a net exporter of cutting edge technology rather than a net importer of cutting edge technology and that dictates a different attitude towards intellectual property rights.

 

So yeah, so I don't, I don't think it's unprecedented for the US to do what it did. But I do wish that Americans had a little bit better sense of the, the complexities of the national past.

>> Niall Ferguson: Can I interject a kinda follow up question to Barry's, what has your research taught you about the probabilities of successfully restricting technology transfer?

 

I mean, what if in a counterfactual world the Royal Navy goes, my God, these men are brilliant, let's take this technology, let's not let anybody else have, at least for the bloody Americans, could they have succeeded? I mean, the implicit counterfactual I'm getting from the book is that Poland, Ischerwood could have been embraced by the military, by the naval establishment and then the Royal Navy would have had a wonder weapon.

 

Their guns would have been fantastically more accurate than they were at Jutland cuz the semi pirated system wasn't that good. But could they have stopped everybody else getting it? How long could they, I mean do you have a sense of. Every time I've heard Jake Sullivan talk about that small yard with the high fence, I've thought, pull the other one, it's got bells on.

 

This never works. But what's your view now that you've written these two books about techn. Military technologies? Can you kind of hang on to a, a lead or is it bound to be copied?

>> Kate Epstein: It seems to me that you can hang on to a lead for a certain amount of time, but that lead, you have to keep innovating.

 

So like that the, the thing that you build the lead on like that's going to get out. So you better be on to the next thing. I think in the pollen and issue case, I don't know if it would have been a wonder weapon. And as I say in the book, it was actually never had head to head trials with the dryer system because I think my hypothesis is that the Admiralty knew it wouldn't like the way those trials turned out.

 

But you know how many hits this is. Pollen made a huge deal of this. My system would have won Jutlands. But that's less interesting to me because it's so obviously self-interested than the conclusions of Royal Navy gunnery officers who say we need to build a system that aligns much more with the way Pollan expected war to go than Dreier expected it to go.

 

It's so hard to know the counterfactual in that case just because it is clear that Sperry and Ford, who were the two contractors who built computers for the Navy and then the Navy chooses Fords, they were not working on them before they found out about, about Pollan's system.

 

And oftentimes it's interesting. There's this fascinating debate over this in the torpedo context that I wrote about in my first book is sometimes it's the mere knowledge that something can be done is enough. You don't even need to know how someone else did it, but you can essentially once you know, you can reverse engineer from, from that knowledge alone.

 

And so the word would have gotten out. It was, it was very closely guarded. Information about fire control and torpedoes were the two most secretive things in navies at the time. But the stuff always gets out. But I just don't know what the timeline for that would have been.

 

And again, I tried to be very careful in the book to say here's the stuff that's in the air and there's a lot in the air. And then here's what Pyle and initially did that was kind of distinctive and that set them apart because there's absolutely a context.

 

No inventor kinda springs forward, springs out of Zeus's head. So yeah, it was in the air. Presumably someone would have come along and figured out how to put it together. But I think it would have taken some time.

>> Niall Ferguson: Going to go to Norbert's question now because he can't activate his mic and it's really a question about patents and the way they work.

 

And I think you've got a, this is something we haven't really touched on in the conversation so far. What was historically the separation between somebody having a patent and an incremental improvement justifies paying license fees? Versus somebody seeing an idea and making a step change improvement that could be considered independent but no fees accordingly.

 

 

>> Kate Epstein: I think it would probably be really hard to generalize about that and you'd have to look at the specific area of innovation. Part of the problem for Pollen, an issue with is that by the late 19th century it had become much more difficult to patent big ideas as distinct from specific physical embodiments of the idea.

 

There was something called a pioneer patent which basically allowed inventors to transcend the normal boundaries on what you could claim in a patent. If they were perceived as having made what Joel Moker Moker calls calls a macro invention as distinct from a micro invention. And were definitely macro inventors and so that would have been perfect for them.

 

The problem is, British historians have shown this, to get a pioneer patent you had to basically have a publicity campaign that established you in the public mind as kinda great, great man, great inventor. And a publicity campaign is incompatible with national security secrecy. And Pollen and Ed Sherwood were determined that they keep their invention secret and the Royal Navy have a monopoly.

 

So that meant they can only take out a regular patent which was actually a secret patent. Which is this whole fascinating thing in Britain going back to 1859. You could have a reg patent that was not published, it was a secret patent. But you couldn't have pioneer scope with a secret patent.

 

So it's always hugely contested like in patent law, like what's the exact boundary of the patent? And I don't, I like, I, I just like in a general way. I don't know how to answer the question about like what's perceived to be deserving of a patent and a license and royalties versus what's not.

 

That is always like in some ways the negotiation.

>> Niall Ferguson: You gave the impression in your presentation that the United that the English, I should say law provided greater protection for private property rights than in the US that in a way there was a more cavalier attitude in the US.

 

Am I right about.

>> Kate Epstein: It's different. So the US system, to borrow a phrase from a well-known book on the subject, democratized invention. So it very much reduced the kind of the barriers to getting a patent which had pluses and minuses. Certainly if you were a foreign inventor who had made a fundamental macro invention, it looked like a wonderful system for enabling Americans to take out small patents on the big thing that you had done and in.

 

But I don't think there was any real difference in an abstract way between the robustness of the protection. It was very different, like what you could get protection on, but if you could get the protection. Of course there's differences. There are different countries, but I didn't need to make a claim about different levels of the robustness of the protection.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, we are out of time because you and I have to do our interview for the cameras and for the, the wider world before we run out of time in this room. So it's going to be my happy duty to thank you very much indeed. Thanks also to Admiral Ellis, the brilliant commentary.

 

Thanks to every who participated in the discussion. We have one more seminar next quarter, I do believe. Joseph, do you want to just say a few words about that?

>> Joseph Ledford: Yes, our next seminar will take place May 14 with Amir Viner of Stanford University. And the invitation and the RSVP for that seminar will be forthcoming in the coming weeks.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: That's it from the Applied History Working Group. Thanks very much indeed, Kate, and thanks to everybody who joined.