Bell Dethroned as Telephone Inventor

On Hold writes "The US Congress has decided that A. G. Bell was not the real inventor of the telephone. According to this article, it was invented by a Florentine immigrant called Meucci. Meucci later worked with Bell in a lab, but couldn't afford the patent fees. It seems like Bell could." Wait until you read the stories giving Shawn Fanning credit for inventing P2P...

Comments

Re: what about elisha gray?

[Black Parrot]

This is one of the main reasons I think patents are, by and large, bogus. There is a marked tendency for multiple people to "invent" something at essentially the same time.

And that's hardly a surprise, since inventions depend critically on the mass of technology current in society. I conjecture that "little guys" do most of the work, and "inventors" merely skim the cream off the top.

This is standard for almost all inventions

[kroymen]

The actual innovator of a concept or technology is almost never credited for it. Rather, it's the second-tier opportunist that takes the work and creativity of the innovator and reinvigorates it by repositioning it within the market or refining it in some way.

Sometimes it's because of the lack of savvy or capital posessed by the true innovator; other times it's that the innovator was operating just outside the realm of either technical practicality or social acceptability.

The true genius of Microsoft was building a business model around that oft-missed truth.