Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2019
This research note uses the case of nineteenth-century Chile to argue that the phenomenon of early green entrepreneurship was not confined to the United States and Europe. It focuses on Chile-based inventors who pursued intellectual-property protection in solar, tidal, wave motion, water flow, and wind power. The backgrounds and careers of these inventors are examined. The case contests the popular assumption that knowledge always originated in the developed North and flowed southward. Instead, at least in the case of renewable energy, knowledge emerged endogenously in Chile and sometimes even flowed northward. This research note argues that the circulation of knowledge was strongly linked to the mobility of individuals rather than to the mobility of patents between North and South.
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23 Some examples are the reports by eighteenth-century physicians such as Louis Feuillee and Amadeo Francis Frezier and those by Darwin and others in the nineteenth century, Ricardo Cruz-Coke Madrid, Historia de la Medicina Chilena (Santiago, 1995). In spite of the country's socioeconomic inequality and backwardness, several traditional indigenous techniques used in South America, and in Chile in particular, were worthy of mention in scientific journals. For example, William Bridges Adams stated, “I have seen Patagonian women, with a loom formed of pegs stuck in the bare earth open to the sky, on their knees plying the shuttle to form a poncho of the brightest of wool, dyed and spun by themselves, and capable of turning any amount of rain water better than the best wool of Leeds or Manchester; and I have seen the Chilé gold crushing mills at work, made of native wood and native granite, with not five pounds weight of iron in their whole composition, extracting gold more effectually than by all the powers hitherto used by more civilised people.” Adams, “On the Culture of Food,” Journal of the Society of Arts 7, no. 321 (1859): 119.
24 Adams, William Bridges, “Proceedings: The Food Committee,” Journal of the Society of Arts 17, no. 839 (1868): 118–23Google Scholar; Abbot, C. G., “The Smithsonian ‘Solar Constant’ Expedition to Calama, Chile,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 4, no. 10 (1918): 313–16CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Abbot, C. G., Knoche, Walter, Moore, Alfred F., and Abbot, Leonard H., “The Smithsonian ‘Solar Constant’ Expedition to Calama, Chile,” Science, n.s., 48, no. 1252 (1918): 635–36Google Scholar.
25 Montero, Rejistro Jeneral.
26 The Official Gazette is the paper that communicates content of a legal nature to the public and by doing so fulfills the publicity requirements that govern the action of the public administration. It normally contains new legislation and petitions of private parties made to the government that may affect third parties’ interests, such as trademark and patent applications. At the time, it also contained third-party oppositions to the latter applications. During the period of study, the gazette published various decisions made by the government regarding these types of procedures. Nonetheless, the plans and designs regarding the subject matter were not published in the gazette.
27 The database singles out patent applications, some decisions made by the government regarding each of them, and any opposition by third parties to applications. However, the gazette does not normally contain information regarding the appointment of patent examiners.
28 We did not include force of gravity, because it was deemed too difficult to separate the cases we were seeking from those that used the term “gravity” in a different manner or with a different meaning.
29 For example, technologies related to underwater devices were common in the period, but they are of no interest for this study. To exclude these cases from the applications that we sought to select, we explicitly excluded applications using nouns related to means of transportation, such as ships, vessels, and boats.
30 Montero, Rejistro Jeneral. An analysis of such data reveals that 1,826 patents were granted between 1873 and 1908. Escobar Andrae, “An Early Patent System”.
31 Gamallo, Victor Vargas, La Apicultura nacional (Santiago, 1900)Google Scholar; Nuevo sistema de colmenas de barras movibles (Havana, 1914).
32 de Benito, Pablo, “Memoria sobre la situación económica de la República de Guatemala en el año de 1911” Memorias diplomáticas y consulares e informaciones 387 (1913):1-59Google Scholar.
33 Harding, “Apparatus for Solar Distillation” (Oct. 1883); “Apparatus for Solar Distillation” (June 1883).
34 Jones, Profits and Sustainability.