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This book charts the emergence of the conception of the invention in modern patent law, focusing on the material media in which the intangible form of the invention is made visible in legal settings. It presents an alternative conceptual history of modern patent law in which the central actors are the media that make the intangible form of the invention visible and tractable, such as scale models, texts, botanical types, and deposits of living material. It also explores historical developments that settled the conditions in which the distinction between idea and embodiment became an unquestioned premise of patent doctrine. In addition, the book outlines a set of representational practices that are essential to the functioning of patent jurisprudence but not noticed or explained by patent doctrine. It suggests that the invention in its modern sense emerged in the course of the eighteenth century, when lawyers and administrators began systematically to make the distinction between ideas and embodiments, or between the invention and the material artefact in which it was expressed.

This chapter examines the role of models of invention as well as the machines and devices they represent in patent jurisprudence. It first charts the evolution of various forms of patent models and the reasons for their persistence, including the widespread use of models as means of instructing manufacture. It then considers the different functions of mechanical models, such as establishing priority of invention, before discussing the obsolescence of such models. It also explores patent litigation models that were deployed in infringement actions.

This chapter examines the ‘principle’ of a machine within the context of invention. It first considers the patent jurisprudence concerning the ‘principle’ of a machine before turning to William Robinson's claim that ‘principle’ was ‘a term of two meanings’: as ‘a natural power or energy’ or as ‘the spirit of the invention’. It then explores when or how nature is ‘transformed’ or ‘applied’ by an artificial arrangement as to become invention, how an idea becomes ‘embodied’ in a material form without losing its immaterial form, and how structure and function articulate so as to generate the ‘mode of operation’ of a machine. It also discusses the invention as an idea of means and the extent to which this theory is represented in practice.

This chapter examines industrial copying by referring to Charles Babbage's theory, which expressed the basic phenomenological premise of modern patent law. It first considers manufacturing as a way of making artefacts that became the implicit founding premise of patent jurisprudence. It then turns to the figure of the manufacture in relation to older senses of copying and how it retained its force into the age of biotechnological and digital invention. It also discusses the distinction between ideas and embodiments, the reproduction of an industrial design as a series of manufactures, Karl Marx's ideas on technical knowledge and intellectual property, the doctrinal distinction between creative ingenuity and mechanical skill, the system of interchangeable manufacture, the notion of catalogue aesthetic, and how the invention takes shape at the intersection of form and matter.