Rewarded Inventions and Repositories in Nineteenth Century Lyon Silk Industry: A Pattern of Collective Management of the “Public Domain”

Silk industrySilksilk industry in eighteenth century LyonTeillard et Cie (Lyon) is an example of local management of inventionInvention. As such, it exemplifies the importance of local institutions for economic regulation, within a variety of productive contexts. LyonTeillard et Cie (Lyon) inherited an organization that had been developed since the eighteenth century, and which had supported collective inventionInvention throughout local funding of the “common domain” of inventionInvention, as it was called. It was a long-lasting model well into the nineteenth century, relying on a host of public repositoriesRepository, hence an urban mapping of expertise. This system introduced flexibility into the rising patent system which, in LyonTeillard et Cie (Lyon), was combined to the “public domainPublic domain” of inventionInvention. But we will stress the limits of this pattern of growth, as a territorialized culture of inventionInvention at a time of expanding markets for inventionsInvention.