BibliOdyssey

There was plenty of invention before patents existed as a legal concept.

Patents exist because some people who came up with clever ideas thought (properly) that it was in their best interest to be granted a legal monopoly on the implementation of their ideas and lobbied lawmakers to grant them these monopolies.

Patents did not come into being because we, as a society (speaking as an American), determined that our pace of innovation was too slow and decided that we needed to do something about it.

This idea, that patents encourage innovation, is the justification, not the motivation, for the legal construct that is the patent. There were no experiments done to test this hypothesis. In fact, I think the history of invention before patents suggests quite strongly that they are not needed; that, in fact, people will invent simply because we are tool builders and tinkerers.

EDIT: To testify to the fact that people invented before patents: http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2011/12/machine-power.html

A book from 1606 showing illustrations of gear and hydraulic powered devices. Some are fanciful, others less so, but they all clearly show humankind figuring out every last way to apply a technology to the tasks of every day life.

This is (was) an another blog of obscure and fantastic images of that sort:

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/

It has been around for years but unfortunately it looks like it stopped being updated last September.

But you can navigate through old posts to find engravings of Japanese falconry, medieval hand combat techniques, Baltic Heraldry (http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2014-09-08T22:55:00%2B10:00&max-results=6&start=8&by-date=false), zoomorphic caligraphy ( http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2014-07-29T00:00:00%2B10:00&max-results=6&start=11&by-date=false ), 16th Century Book of Commets ( http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2013/09/comet-sketches.html ) and so on.

Map Sea Monsters is one of my favorite:

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2013/08/map-monsters.html

The book illustration/art history blog BibliOdyssey has some great scans of a 16th century German longsword fighting manual called Der Fechtbuch that features some of the moves seen in this video. As well as some that really surprised me, like the opening illustration of two combatants fighting with reversed swords (hilt to hilt rather than blade to blade) which was apparently an actual technique used for bludgeoning.

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2012/06/der-fechtkampf.html