“But Mr. Champion, as a further answer to Mr. Wedgwood’s implication of want of skill, begs leave to observe that the Dresden manufacture (like this, a native clay), which has been established so great a number of years, was long before it attained perfection, and even now it has not that exact proportion of shape which the Chinese manufacture possesses. The Austrian manufacture (also a native clay) was twenty-five years before it attained any degree of perfection, and then only by accidental aid of the Dresden workmen who were dispersed during the late war. The work in Brandenburgh is nothing more than the Dresden materials, wrought by workmen removed hither from that city, the Brandenburgh work having no clay of its own territory. Mr. Champion is surprised that Mr. Wedgwood can find no cause but one, which he chooses to blame, why a new manufacture, upon a principle never before tried in England, should not have attained perfection in a shorter space than the very short space of seven years.
“As to Mr. Wedgwood’s calculation of the profits sufficient to recompense the ingenuity, and repay the trouble and expense of others, Mr. Champion submits it to a discerning and encouraging legislature, whether a seven years’ sale is likely to repay a seven years’ unproductive, experimental, and chargeable labour, as well as the future improvement to grow from new endeavours? Until Mr. Champion was able to make this porcelain in quantities to supply a market, it was rather an object of curiosity than a manufacture for national benefit.
“There is one branch of the manufacture, the blue and white, upon which he has just entered—this branch is likely to be the most generally useful of any: but the giving a blue colour under the glaze, on so hard a material as he uses, has been found full of difficulty. This object he has pursued at a great expense by means of a foreign artificer; and he can now venture to assert that he shall bring that to perfection which has been found so difficult in Europe in native clay.
“If the various difficulties which have attended his work from its beginning could have been foreseen, this patent ought not to have been applied for at so early a period. The time in which profit was to be expected has necessarily been laid out in experiment. It was thought that when the principle was found, the work was done; but the perfecting a chemical discovery into a merchantable commodity has been found a troublesome and a tedious work. It is therefore presumed that the legislature will distinguish between the over-sanguine hopes, in point of time, of an invention which, however, has at length succeeded, and those visionary projects which deceive for ever. Upon the whole, Mr. Champion humbly rests his pretensions to the protection of the legislature upon three grounds—that he has been almost from the beginning concerned in the work which has cost so much labour and expense; that he now allows the inventor a certain and increasing recompense, though the carrying that invention to an actual merchantable manufacture was entirely his own work; that the potteries of chinaware in most other countries in Europe have been at the charge of sovereign princes. It has been immediately so in France, Austria, Dresden, and Brandenburgh; in Italy they have been under the care of great noblemen. In this original work Mr. Champion claims the principal share of supporting, improving, and carrying into execution a manufacture so much admired in China and Japan, and now first attempted in Britain, in capacity of resisting the greatest heat, equal to the Asiatic and Dresden.”
Wedgwood answered this “Reply” of Champion’s by some “Remarks,” which he issued to the members of the legislature, wherein he reminds them that he “has all his life been concerned in the manufacture and improvement of various branches of pottery and porcelain; that he has long had an ambition to carry these manufactures to the highest pitch of perfection they will admit of; and that so far from having any personal interest in opposing Mr. Champion, it would evidently have been his interest to have accepted of some of the obliging proposals that have been made to him by Mr. Champion and his friends, and to have said nothing more upon the subject; but Mr. Wedgwood is so fully convinced of the great injury that would be done to the landed, manufacturing, and commercial interests of this nation, by extending the term of Mr. Champion’s monopoly of raw materials, of which there are immense quantities in the kingdom, and confining the use of them to one or a few hands, that he thought it a duty of moral obligation to take the sense of his neighbours upon this subject, and to give up to the manufactory at large all advantages he might have secured to himself. It is upon these principles, and these alone, that he has acted in this business, and therefore he humbly presumes he does not merit the censure of avidity in grasping at other men’s manufactures, though he thinks that himself and all manufacturers should be protected in the free use of all raw materials that are not invented by men, but are the natural productions of the earth. When Mr. Wedgwood discovered the art of making Queen’s Ware, which employs ten times more people than all the china works in the kingdom, he did not ask for a patent for this important discovery. A patent would greatly have limited its public utility. Instead of one hundred manufactories of Queen’s Ware, there would have been one; and instead of an exportation to all quarters of the world, a few pretty things would have been made for the amusement of the people of fashion in England. It would be the same with the use of the materials in question: if they are not only confined to the use of one person or manufactory, by patent, for fourteen years, but that patent be extended for twenty or thirty years longer, so long they may be the means of supporting one trifling manufactory; but if the materials are left free for general use, and Mr. Champion is in possession of the result of all his experiments and real discoveries with respect to the art of manufacturing these raw materials into porcelain, no essential part of which has been revealed by him to the public, either in his specifications or otherwise, then there is reason to expect a very large and extensive manufactory of porcelain will be established in various parts of this kingdom, to the great benefit of the public, without any injury to Mr. Champion.”
Wedgwood continued his “remarks” by replying that Mr. Champion’s offer of inserting a clause to allow the potters the free use of the raw material in all kinds of earthenware, restricting its use in porcelain only to himself, was a useless concession, because Champion had failed to define the difference between earthenware and porcelain, and had failed to impart the secret of his manufacture to the public, either by his specifications or otherwise. “How then,” he asked, “are the Staffordshire potters to use the growan stone and growan clay for the improvement of their finer stone and earthenwares, without producing such a manufacture as may in Westminster Hall be deemed porcelain?” He also said that, judging from Mr. Champion’s own words, Cookworthy’s patent “ought not to have been applied for at so early a period,” it was evident that the “patent was taken out for a discovery of the art of making true porcelain before it was made; and if the discovery has been since made, there can have been no specification of it; it has not been revealed to the public, it is in Mr. Champion’s own possession, and being unknown, it is presumed the right to practise it cannot be confirmed or extended by Act of Parliament, which ought to have some clear ground to go upon.” The patent, he says, has evidently been considered as a privilege to the patentee, “for the sole right of making experiments upon materials which many persons have thought would make good porcelain, and on which experiments have been prosecuted by several successive sets of operators many years before the date of the patent.” He contended that it would have been an “egregious injury to the public” to continue the patent to one person who was no original discoverer, who was only just commencing the commonest and most useful part of his business with the aid of a foreign artificer, in the hope that a discovery might at some future time be made. He considered that if the raw materials were thrown open to all, “a variety of experienced hands would probably produce more advantage to the nation in a few years than they would ever do when confined to one manufactory, however skilful the director might be,” and that the extension of the patent securing the monopoly “would be a precedent of the most dangerous nature, contrary to policy, and of general inconvenience,” and therefore he “humbly hopes the legislature will not grant the prayer of Mr. Champion’s petition,”—a hope which, however earnestly expressed, and however tenaciously followed, was eventually of no avail. To this opposition, however, is doubtless to be traced the ultimate abandonment of the patent, and the manufacture of the less difficult soft paste to so great an extent in Staffordshire.
The term of the original patent, it will be remembered, was for fourteen years, of which nearly eight years remained unexpired at the time when it was assigned over by Cookworthy to Champion. The extension petitioned for would thus have given Champion nearly twenty-two years’ exclusive right to the raw materials, and it was this extended monopoly which aroused the watchfulness of Wedgwood, and made him determined to use his utmost efforts to prevent its being enacted. In this opposition—which was determined and energetic, though only partially successful—Wedgwood, besides memorialising the legislature against granting the prayer of the petition, issued a number of “Reasons why the extension of the term of Mr. Cookworthy’s patent, by authority of parliament, would be injurious to many landowners, to the manufacturers of earthenware, and to the public.” In addition to this, he made out and presented a “Case of the manufacturers of earthenware in Staffordshire,” setting forth the advantages that would be derived from throwing open the use of the raw materials, and the disadvantages which an extension of the monopoly would entail, not only on the manufacturers, but on the public at large.
These “reasons” why the extension of the term of Mr. Cookworthy’s patent, by authority of parliament, would be injurious to landowners, to the manufacturers of earthenware, and to the public are so ingenious, and the “case” so carefully made out, that I here give them entire.[95]
“It would be injurious to the landowners, because by means of this monopoly materials of great value would be locked up within the bowels of the earth, and the owners be deprived of the power of disposing of them; for the present patentee and his assigns have contracted with one gentleman that he shall sell these materials only to them, and that they shall purchase such materials only from him, during the term of ninety-nine years.
“It would be injurious to the manufacturers of earthenware; because, notwithstanding the mechanical part of their manufactory, their execution, their forms, their painting, &c., are equal, if not superior, to those of any other country, yet the body of their ware stands in great need of improvement, both in colour and texture; because the public begin to require and expect such improvement; because without such improvement the sale of their manufactures will probably decline in favour of foreign manufacturers, who may not be deprived of the use of the materials that their countries produce. For the consideration in this case is not whether one manufacturer or manufactory shall be supported against another, but whether the earthenware manufactories of Great Britain shall be supported in their improvements against those of every other country in the world; because the materials in question are the most proper of any that have been found in this island for the improvement of the manufactures of earthenware; and because no line has been drawn, or can be drawn, with sufficient distinctness, between earthenware and porcelain, and especially between earthenware and the various kinds of this patent porcelain, to render it safe for any potter to make use of these materials in his works.