300 years of British patents

The study of innovation depends heavily on high-quality patent data. Yet, datasets containing complete patent documents focus only on recent decades, while historical patent datasets with broader temporal coverage typically lack detailed information. Therefore, our ability to leverage advances in textual analyses to study long-run innovation dynamics remains limited. To this end, we introduce a large-scale dataset of the universe of technical specifications of British patents granted between 1617–1899. Our data consists of the full specification texts alongside linked information about inventors, including their disambiguated names, occupations, and addresses. We use our data to document changes over time in total inventive activity, the geography of innovation, inventor occupations, and patent novelty and impact. Finally, we discuss use cases and avenues for subsequent research. Resources : Dataset ; GitHub • We publicly release three centuries of British patent data (1617–1899) for research on innovation. • We use fine-tuned language models to extract and link inventor information (including names, occupations, and geocoded addresses). • Our dataset directly facilitates textual analyses of historical patent documents.