Drawing on more than a decade of archival research in the US and UK, including in many never-before-used records, the book follows computerized systems' technological and legal history for aiming the big guns of battleships in the first half of the 20th century.  The pioneering system was invented by two British civilians named Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood in the decade before 1914.  At its heart was indisputably the most sophisticated analog computer of the day, decades ahead of its time, and one that contemporaries regarded as a form of artificial intelligence ("a machine that uses intelligence").  Rather than pay for their invention, however, the British Navy and then the US Navy pirated it.  Then, when the inventors sued for patent infringement, the British and American governments invoked legal privileges to withhold evidence from plaintiffs on the grounds of national security secrecy. 

In the United States, their lawsuits became entangled with high-level Anglo-American diplomacy during World War II and with the Manhattan Project.  The arguments developed by the government in their case, which built on precedents stretching back to 19th-century Britain, helped to lay the groundwork for the nuclear-secrecy regime. 

Analog Superpowers thus speaks to several major issues: the relationship between intellectual property and national security in the two most powerful liberal societies of the modern era, the impact of patent laws on defense innovation, the history of nuclear secrecy, and the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.  With tensions between the US and China over computing technology and AI all over the news today, the book also offers a historical perspective on matters of intense contemporary relevance.

About the Speaker
Katherine C. Epstein is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. She is the author of two books: Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Harvard University Press, 2014); and Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (Chicago, 2024).  Her research, supported by an ACLS Burkhardt fellowship and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines the intersection of government secrecy, defense contracting, and intellectual property in the United States and Great Britain in the first half of the 20th century.  Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, American Purpose, and Liberties, among other publications. 

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Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies