Analog Superpowers
How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
A gripping history that spans law, international affairs, and top-secret technology to unmask the tension between intellectual property rights and national security.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day, a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II, the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles, and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today. Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention, the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it, one after the other. When the inventors sued, both the British and US governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns.
Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Analog Superpowers analyzes these and related legal battles over naval technology, exploring how national defense tested the two countries’ commitment to individual rights and the free market. Katherine C. Epstein deftly sets out Pollen’s and Isherwood’s pioneering achievements, the patent questions raised, the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and the United States, and the legal precedents each country developed to control military tools built by private contractors.
Epstein’s account reveals that long before the US national security state sought to restrict information about atomic energy, it was already embroiled in another contest between innovation and secrecy. The America portrayed in this sweeping and accessible history isn’t yet a global hegemon but a rising superpower ready to acquire foreign technology by fair means or foul—much as it accuses China of doing today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Epstein (Torpedo) provides a rigorous overview of tensions that emerged between militaries and defense contractors over intellectual property law in the early 20th century. At the center of Epstein's argument is a breakthrough "analog computer" designed in 1906 by British inventors Arthur Pollen and Michael Isherwood that used algorithmic prediction to radically improve the ability of one ship's guns to target another. Pollen and Isherwood's "calculating and predicting machine" was quickly pirated by both the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, a theft which Epstein uses as an entry point to an expansive tour of British and U.S. patent law and the turn-of-the-century squabbling that proliferated among private contractors and the British and U.S. governments. She shows how emerging concerns about national security and state secrets clashed with existing liberal attitudes about the importance of protecting IP as both countries, jockeying for naval dominance, trampled over the rights of inventors. Once the reader acclimates to the technical jargon, the narrative takes on a brisk, dishy feel, as Epstein peppers her catalogue of stolen inventions and legal disputes with evocative firsthand accounts. In her opening and closing sections, though, Epstein offers hot takes on much broader topics, including current China-U.S. relations, that feel somewhat rushed. Still, this is a unique perspective on the military-industrial complex that, at its best, reads like a legal thriller for the technically minded.
