Patents and Prisons: Simon Sturtevant and the Death of the Renaissance Inventor

TY - JOUR

T1 - Patents and Prisons

T2 - Simon Sturtevant and the Death of the Renaissance Inventor

AU - Sherman, William H.

PY - 2009/6

Y1 - 2009/6

N2 - This essay reconstructs the rise and fall of an English inventor named Simon Sturtevant (ca. 1570-1624?). Almost unknown today, he wrote ingenious works on everything from lexicography to military technology and secured patents in the fields of hydraulic engineering, metallurgy, and book production. Like many other speculators, he ended up in debtors' prison: his fate is a painful reminder of the epidemic of debt that swept through Elizabethan and Jacobean London, and he has much to teach us about those who made their livings-and sometimes lost their lives-during what Defoe would later call the first Age of Projects.

AB - This essay reconstructs the rise and fall of an English inventor named Simon Sturtevant (ca. 1570-1624?). Almost unknown today, he wrote ingenious works on everything from lexicography to military technology and secured patents in the fields of hydraulic engineering, metallurgy, and book production. Like many other speculators, he ended up in debtors' prison: his fate is a painful reminder of the epidemic of debt that swept through Elizabethan and Jacobean London, and he has much to teach us about those who made their livings-and sometimes lost their lives-during what Defoe would later call the first Age of Projects.

KW - Simon Sturtevant

KW - prison writings

KW - inventors

KW - debtors' prison

KW - King's Bench

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77950680833&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1525/hlq.2009.72.2.239

DO - 10.1525/hlq.2009.72.2.239

M3 - Article

VL - 72

SP - 239

EP - 256

JO - Huntington Library Quarterly

JF - Huntington Library Quarterly

IS - 2

ER -