Rights to Advanced Technologies. During the industrial age, governments wanted to preserve their national advantages in machinery, worker expertise, and scientific knowledge. Individuals or groups who developed new techniques and new, or more-efficient, machines wanted to maintain their exclusive rights to their inventions while also profiting from them. Because the scientific community was international in scope, however, researchers in different parts of the world sometimes reached similar conclusions at almost the same time. Because interests of governments, inventors, and scientists were often in conflict and because of differences among nations and regions in resources and infrastructures, some scientific advances or technological innovations spread more rapidly and more widely than others, affecting not only a nation's economy but also its military preparedness.

Patents. Throughout the industrialized world, legal protections known as patents for inventors encouraged technological innovation. The first recorded patent...