The origins of patents for invention are obscure and no one country can claim to have been the first in the field with a patent system. However, Britain does have the longest continuous patent tradition in the world. Its origins can be traced back to the 15th century, when the Crown started making specific grants of privilege to manufacturers and traders.

Such grants were signified by Letters Patent, open letters marked with the King's Great Seal. The earliest known English patent for invention was granted by Henry VI to Flemish- born John of Utynam in 1449. The patent gave John a 20-year monopoly for a method of making stained glass, required for the windows of Eton College, that had not been previously known in England.

In the time of the Tudors it became common practice for the Crown to grant monopolies for trades and manufacturers, including patents for invention. During the 30 years from 1561 to 1590, Elizabeth I granted about 50 patents whereby the recipients were enabled to exercise monopolies in the manufacture and sale of commodities such as soap, saltpetre, alum, leather, salt, glass, knives, sailcloth, sulphur, starch, iron and paper. However, the Queen did refuse to grant patents in certain cases. For example, in 1596 Sir John Harrington's request for a patent on his design for a water closet was turned down on the grounds of propriety.

Under both Elizabeth I and her successor James I, the granting of monopolies for particular commodities became increasingly subject to abuse. It was not uncommon for grants to be made for inventions and trades that were not new; for example, a patent granted by Elizabeth I for the making of knives with bone shafts was held by the Court of Queen's Bench to be unsustainable because these articles were already being made in the Realm. In some instances grants were made to royal favourites or for the purpose of replenishing royal coffers.

In 1610, James I was forced by mounting judicial criticism and public outcry to revoke all previous patents and declare in his "Book of Bounty" that 'monopolies are things contrary to our laws' and "we expressly command that no suitor presume to move us". He stated an exception to this ban for "projects of new invention so they be not contrary to the law, nor mischievous to the State". The doctrine of the public interest was thus introduced into the patent system at a very early date and the words were incorporated into the Statute of Monopolies of 1624. Section 6 of the Statute rendered illegal all monopolies except those "for the term of 14 years or under hereafter to be made of the sole working or making of any manner of new manufactures within this Realm to the true and first inventor"; such monopolies should not be "contrary to the law nor mischievous to the State by raising prices of commodities at home or hurt of trade".

In the 200 years after the Statute of Monopolies, the patent system developed through the work of lawyers and judges in the courts without government regulation. In the reign of Queen Anne, the law officers of the Crown established as a condition of grant that "the patentee must by an instrument in writing describe and ascertain the nature of the invention and the manner in which it is to be performed". James Puckle's 1718 patent for a machine gun was one of the first to be required to provide a "specification", as this instrument became known. The famous patent of Arkwright for spinning machines was voided for the lack of an adequate specification in 1785, after it had been in existence for 10 years. On the other hand, extensive litigation on Watt's 1796 patent for steam engines established the important principles that valid patents could be granted for improvements in a known machine, and for ideas or principles, even though the specification might be limited to bare statements of such improvements or principles, provided they could be readily carried into effect, or were "clothed in practical application".

Britain's patent system served the country well during the dramatic technological changes of the industrial revolution. However, by the mid- 19th century it had become extremely inefficient. The Great Exhibition of 1851 accelerated demands for patent reform.

Up to that time, any prospective patentee had to present a petition to no less than seven offices, and at each stage to pay certain fees. The procedure was described in exaggerated form, somewhat derisively, by Charles Dickens in his spoof, "A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent", published in the 19th-century popular journal "Household Words"; Dickens' inventor visits 34 offices (including some abolished years before). To meet public concerns over this state of affairs, the Patent Office was established by the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852, which completely overhauled the British patent system and laid down a simplified procedure for obtaining patents of invention.

Norbert Wiener had been teaching mathematics at MIT since 1919. Soon after his arrival there he had become acquainted with the neurophysiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, onetime collabourator of Walter B. Cannon (who gave homeostasis its name). Out of this new friendship cybernetics would be born, twenty years later. With Wiener's help Rosenblueth set up small interdisciplinary teams to explore the no man's land between the established sciences.

In 1940 Wiener worked with a young engineer, Julian H. Bigelow, to develop automatic range finders for antiaircraft guns. Such servomechanisms are able to predict the trajectory of an aeroplane by taking into account the elements of past trajectories. During the course of their work Wiener and Bigelow were struck by two astonishing facts: the seemingly "intelligent" behaviour of these machines and the "diseases" that could affect them. Theirs appeared to be "intelligent" behaviour because they dealt with "experience" (the recording of past events) and predictions of the future. There was also a strange defect in performance: if one tried to reduce the friction, the system entered into a series of uncontrollable oscillations.

Impressed by this disease of the machine, Wiener asked Rosenblueth whether such behaviour was found in man. The response was affirmative: in the event of certain injuries to the cerebellum, the patient cannot lift a glass of water to his mouth; the movements are amplified until the contents of the glass spill on the ground. From this Wiener inferred that in order to control a finalized action (an action with a purpose) the circulation of information needed for control must form "a closed loop allowing the evaluation of the effects of one's actions and the adaptation of future conduct based on past performances." This is typical of the guidance system of the antiaircraft gun, and it is equally characteristic of the nervous system when it orders the muscles to make a movement whose effects are then detected by the senses and fed back to the brain.

Thus Wiener and Bigelow discovered the closed loop of information necessary to correct any action--   the negative feedback loop--and they generalised this discovery in terms of the human organism.

During this period the multidisciplinary teams of Rosenblueth were being formed and organized. Their purpose was to approach the study of living organisms from the viewpoint of a servomechanisms engineer and, conversely, to consider servomechanisms with the experience of the physiologist. An early seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1942 brought together mathematicians, physiologists, and mechanical and electrical engineers. In light of its success, a series of ten seminars was arranged by the Josiah Macy Foundation. One man working with Rosenblueth in getting these seminars under way was the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, who was to play a considerable role in the new field of cybernetics. In 1948 two basic publications marked an epoch already fertile with new ideas: Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver.

The latter work founded information theory, which lies behind all human production behaviours, not least those concerned with the management of human economic systems.