The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
Title: The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
Author(s): William Rosen
Year: 2010
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6705-3 (hardcover); 978-0-22672-634-2 (University of Chicago Press paperback, 2012)
Description:
The book traces how the emergence of intellectual property rights—especially patents—helped drive the Industrial Revolution by allowing inventors to own and profit from their ideas. Rosen centers the narrative on the development of the steam engine, from early experiments in antiquity through James Watt’s breakthroughs, while weaving in the legal and philosophical ideas (e.g., John Locke, Sir Edward Coke) that made invention a commercially viable activity. The result is a hybrid history of technology, law, and ideas, explaining not just how steam power changed the world, but why the “idea” of owning an idea became so transformative.
