The business records of textile entrepreneur and inventor Erastus Bigelow offer extraordinary detail about how financing innovation worked on the ground in the antebellum United States. For the first decades of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Americans sought patent protection, even as patents often brought little monetary benefit or status to their holders. Historians have tended to look to the court system to account for why this was the case, even though only a small percentage of patent holders ever litigated. This article, by contrast, examines the securitization of patents, which many inventors increasingly saw as supple tools to secure research funds and monetize intellectual property. As individuals and firms bought and sold patents for cash, labor contracts, and funding for further research and development, they shaped an evolving market for intellectual property. Throughout the nineteenth century, this market offered inventors increasing opportunities to offload the risks, and sometimes the rewards, of invention.

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The years surrounding the origins of the term “Manifest Destiny” were a transitional period in the history of industrialization. Historians have done much to analyze the impact of major technological shifts on business structure and management, and to connect eastern markets and westward expansion. They have paid less attention, however, to the relationship among continental geopolitics, industrial development, and frontier warfare. This article uses War Department papers, congressional reports, and manufacturers’ records to examine how the arms industry developed in response to military conflict on the frontier. As public and private manufacturers altered production methods, product features, and their relationships to one another, they contributed to the industrial developments of the mid-nineteenth century.

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time as "less international" but "ultimately more global than the secondwave organizations" (p. 239). The major organizations, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), developed the protocols on which the Internet operates. Like the first wave of standards groups, government agencies had little involvement with developing these standards. Another point of similarity is that the Internet standardizers, like their engineering forebears, prized technical acumen over commercial considerations. Yates and Murphy describe the 1992 "constitutional crisis" of the IETF, when prominent members rebelled against a networking protocol favored by the U.S. Defense Department. IETF member David Clark delivered a manifesto at this meeting: "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code" (p. 250). Similarly, W3C defines its twofold mission as promoting "Web for All" and "Web on Everything," irrespective of national or corporate goals (p. 264). This book is history at its finest. It is not only a technical and business history of engineering standards but also a deeply researched social history of communities of standardizers. It is also elegantly written-a testament to Yates's and Murphy's research and writing skills. Historians of capitalism and technology will find it required reading, but this book also stands a fair chance of engaging a mass readership.

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