Steam power, light bulbs, telephone, radio, aircraft, television, and numerous other inventions were very much in the Zeitgeist, and the fact of numerous patents being filed (or warred over) means that at best the benefits you describe are at best zero-sum: the benefits accruing to one party are those which are denied another. From an investment standpoint, this means that any such backing becomes a gamble: will an innovation pay off if a patent can be successfully filed with primacy (see Bell vs. Gray: https://www.princeton.edu/ssp/trips/data/scientificamerican0...), given primacy, and defended.
James Watt through 1800 sold a total of 500 steam engines, all low-pressure vacuum-action (the work stroke came from the condensation phase, not from the recovery steam-entry phase), with typical ratings of 20 kW, several times greater than typical watermills of the time. Most were restricted to pumping water. Watt obstructed mobile applications (ships or rail).
Expiry of his patents saw high-pressure steam engines with far higher power, mobile applications (ships, rail), tremendous increases in power (to 1,000 kW by 1850). Innovations meant both larger and smaller engines were available -- the former capable of powering large factories, locomotives, and ships, the latter for small point-of-use power sources. Much as large and small electric motors provide both raw capacity and very specific localisation.
General history of steam and specifically of Watt's obstruction of innovation are covered well in Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, pp 235ff.
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms notes that few of the early industrial innovators, Watt included, made much return based on either patent royalties or patent-era sales, looking at key inventors of the early Industrial Revolution: John Kay (flying shuttle), James Hargreaves (spinning jenny), Richard Arkwright (spinning frame), Samuel Crompton (spinning mule), Reverend Edmund Cartwright (power loom), Eli Whitney (cotton gin), and Richard Roberts (power loom, machine tools).
Of the list, Kay, Hargreaves, and Roberts died in poverty. Crompton and Cartwright were granted substantial payments by acts of Parliament (£5,000 and £10,000 respectively), Whitney made money through arms sales to the U.S. government, and of the lot, only Arkwright earned significant wealth, half a million pounds, after his patents stopped being honored by other manufacturers.
The case against patents generally is made in "The Case Against Patents", by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:
It's truly amusing that you should mention Unix. I'll just quote from Wikipedia as the facts are very well established:
The Unix operating system was first presented formally to the outside world at the 1973 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, where Ritchie and Thompson delivered a paper. This led to requests for the system, but under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, the Bell System (the parent organization of Bell Labs) was forbidden from entering any business other than "common carrier communications services", and was required to license any patents it had upon request.[6] Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Bell Labs instead shipped the system for the cost of media and shipping.[6] Ken Thompson quietly began answering requests by shipping out tapes and disks, each accompanied by – according to legend – a note signed, "Love, Ken”.[12]
That is, AT&T were specifically enjoined from making profitable use of their inconvenient operating system, which instead developed under a general sharing and collaborative model of development, some at AT&T, much at Berkeley, MIT, and other (mostly academic) sites, and through such publications as Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code.
Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1935) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly becoming among my favourite references to these:
James Watt through 1800 sold a total of 500 steam engines, all low-pressure vacuum-action (the work stroke came from the condensation phase, not from the recovery steam-entry phase), with typical ratings of 20 kW, several times greater than typical watermills of the time. Most were restricted to pumping water. Watt obstructed mobile applications (ships or rail).
Expiry of his patents saw high-pressure steam engines with far higher power, mobile applications (ships, rail), tremendous increases in power (to 1,000 kW by 1850). Innovations meant both larger and smaller engines were available -- the former capable of powering large factories, locomotives, and ships, the latter for small point-of-use power sources. Much as large and small electric motors provide both raw capacity and very specific localisation.
General history of steam and specifically of Watt's obstruction of innovation are covered well in Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, pp 235ff.
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms notes that few of the early industrial innovators, Watt included, made much return based on either patent royalties or patent-era sales, looking at key inventors of the early Industrial Revolution: John Kay (flying shuttle), James Hargreaves (spinning jenny), Richard Arkwright (spinning frame), Samuel Crompton (spinning mule), Reverend Edmund Cartwright (power loom), Eli Whitney (cotton gin), and Richard Roberts (power loom, machine tools).
Of the list, Kay, Hargreaves, and Roberts died in poverty. Crompton and Cartwright were granted substantial payments by acts of Parliament (£5,000 and £10,000 respectively), Whitney made money through arms sales to the U.S. government, and of the lot, only Arkwright earned significant wealth, half a million pounds, after his patents stopped being honored by other manufacturers.
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8461.html
The case against patents generally is made in "The Case Against Patents", by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf
It's truly amusing that you should mention Unix. I'll just quote from Wikipedia as the facts are very well established:
The Unix operating system was first presented formally to the outside world at the 1973 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, where Ritchie and Thompson delivered a paper. This led to requests for the system, but under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, the Bell System (the parent organization of Bell Labs) was forbidden from entering any business other than "common carrier communications services", and was required to license any patents it had upon request.[6] Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Bell Labs instead shipped the system for the cost of media and shipping.[6] Ken Thompson quietly began answering requests by shipping out tapes and disks, each accompanied by – according to legend – a note signed, "Love, Ken”.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix
That is, AT&T were specifically enjoined from making profitable use of their inconvenient operating system, which instead developed under a general sharing and collaborative model of development, some at AT&T, much at Berkeley, MIT, and other (mostly academic) sites, and through such publications as Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code.
Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1935) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly becoming among my favourite references to these:
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
And though the headline story concerns trademark and noncompetes, rather than patents, "Battles over Barbie" describes largely the same dynamics:
http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2019/9/6/battles-over-b...