1971/07/01 by Seymour L. Chapin · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Engineering · #History of Science and Medicine #History of Science and Natural History #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Patent analysis #History of technology #Engineering #Aeronautics #Computer science #History #Data science #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.2307/3102997
openalex publication_date 1971/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
and technological activity offered to the readers of this journal, Derek Price advocated the interesting, if debatable, thesis that, roughly speaking, science is a culminating activity which is papyrocentric, while technology also culminates, but in a papyrophobic fashion.' That is to say, more simply, that the former activity leads to publication, while the latter does not. Price admitted the existence of a large body of technological literature, but said that clearly it does not feed on itself to grow at the mighty rate displayed by science; it does not, in his terminology, culminate. And this applied even to that special branch of this production, patent literature. Actually, Price said little of patents and their role, except to see them as the producers of the long gap between invention and publication and the supporters of private gain thereafter. He did not indicate their obvious use for the history of technology, much of which, in fact, he thought appears to be antiquarian descriptions of artifacts and processes because it lacks a basis in written papers. Yet it seems clear that patents are-or can be-an important tool to the historian of technology, and precisely because they are written documents.2 They may not culminate in the sense of citations and