Forget Edison: This is How History’s Greatest Inventions Really Happened
The myth of the solitary inventor and the eureka moment. The world’s most famous inventors are household names. Except they didn’t. The ideas didn’t spring, Athena-like, fully formed from their brains. In fact, they didn’t spring from anybody’s brains.
The modern cotton gin was a eureka moment that multiple inventors experienced nearly simultaneously and was expedited by their competition.
The fabric cotton comes from cotton fibers that mix with seeds in the pods of cotton plants. To make the fabric, you have to separate the fibers from the seeds.
- For centuries this was done mostly by hand, until Eli Whitney “invented” the cotton gin in 1793.
Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telegraph and lightbulb, respectively
Samuel Morse was having dinner one night and thought, if an electrical signal could travel instantly across a wire, why couldn’t information do the same?
- The telegraph was invented by not only Morse, but also Charles Wheatstone, Sir William Fothergill Cooke, Edward Davy, and Carl August von Steinhiel so near to each other that the British Supreme Court refused to issue one patent.
- It was Joseph Henry, not Samuel Morse, who discovered that coiling wire would strengthen electromagnetic induction, and the solution to Morse’s problem was to turn electrical signals into sounds.
The car industry represents the epitome of incremental innovation
Today’s cars bear the names of their founders and innovators
- But have you ever heard of a Dodge bicycle? Or a Mercedes tricycle?
- The car was a typical “invention” that was far too complicated for one person to conceive on his won.
- Orville and Wilbur Wright solved one of the most nagging problems facing airplane developers by having “a single cable warp the wing and turn the rudder at the same time.”
- Farnsworth projected a straight line on a machine called the Image Dissector, which is truly the basis for the all-electronic television.