Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the.... - Katherine C. Epstein

History of Science Lecture Series

Topic: Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State
Speaker: Katherine C. Epstein
Affiliation: Rutgers University-Camden
Date: November 14, 2025
Dilworth Room

Analog Superpowers explores the early history of computing, intellectual property law, government secrecy, and Anglo-American relations to draw out surprising connections with today’s world of digital devices and great-power competition. It follows the invention by two British defense contractors, in the decade before World War I, of an analog computer for aiming the big guns of battleships. Rather than pay for the invention, however, both the British navy and the US navy pirated it. Then, when the inventors sued for patent infringement, first the British and then the American government invoked legal privileges to withhold evidence on the grounds of national-security secrecy. In the United States, moreover, the lawsuits became entangled with high-level Anglo-American diplomacy during World War II and with the Manhattan Project. Analog Superpowers thus provides a new account of the impact of patent laws on defense innovation, the development of nuclear secrecy and the national-security state, and the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. With tensions between the US and China over computing technology all over the news today, it also offers historical perspective on matters of intense contemporary relevance.

Katherine C. Epstein is professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. She is the author of two books: Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Harvard University Press, 2014). Her research, which has been 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, as well as the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. In addition to numerous scholarly journals, her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Liberties, and American Purpose.