‘Privatization’ of the electron

The emergence of techno-scientific capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been examined extensively by science and technology studies and the historical sociology of markets. It is often characterized by the recruitment of physicists and chemists to improve the manufacturing processes and technical objects commercialized by large corporations. The first research laboratories that appeared within electrical engineering and telecommunication firms mark this unprecedented internalization and privatization of academic science. Researchers’ practical skills were thus applied very early for technology transfer purposes, whereas their theoretical knowledge served later to define the inventions legally and to protect them from competition. Knowledge about the electron gradually became of immense commercial and financial interest, owing largely to the evolution of policy and judicial regulations. A comparison between France and the United States shows that this was a result not only of entrepreneurial and industrial strategies, but also of the adaptation of the management of capital and patents to different socio- economic conditions in the two countries.