历史上最伟大发明的真相

爱迪生真的发明了电灯泡？莱特兄弟真的发明了飞机？那些历史上具有里程碑意义的发明是否真如传言所说，是某些发明家灵感忽现的产物？拨开历史的重重迷雾，也许你会发现：有些人，一直在(或“被”)沽名钓誉；有些事，我们一直被蒙在鼓里……

The world’s most famous inventors are household names. As we all know, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, and Samuel Morse invented the telegraph.

Except they didn’t. The ideas didn’t spring, Athena-like, fully formed from their brains. In fact, they didn’t spring fully formed from anybody’s brains. That is the myth of the lonely inventor and the eureka1) moment.

“Simultaneous invention and incremental2) improvement are the way innovation works, even for radical inventions,” Mark A. Lemley3) writes in his fascinating paper The Myth of the Sole Inventor. Lemley’s paper concentrates on the history and problems of patents. But he also chronicles the history of the 19th and 20th century’s most famous inventors—with an emphasis on how their inventions were really neither theirs, nor inventions. Here is a super-quick summary of his wonderful distillation of the last 200 years in collaborative innovation.

Light Bulb

As just about everyone is taught, Thomas Edison invented the light-bulb. And as just about everyone later learns, Thomas Edison in no way invented the light-bulb. Electric lighting existed before him, incandescent4) light bulbs existed before him, and when other inventors got wind of5) Edison’s tinkerings6), they roundly7) sued him for patent infringement. So what did Edison actually do? He discovered that a special species of bamboo had a higher resistance to electricity than carbonized paper, which means it could more efficiently produce light. Edison got rich off the bamboo, and filthy disgusting rich8) from superior manufacturing and marketing of his product. But within a generation other inventors had developed better filaments9) and today’s light-bulbs.

Telegraph

As the tale goes, Samuel Morse was having dinner with friends and debating electromagnetism10) when he realized that if an electrical signal could travel instantly across a wire, why couldn’t information do the same? Like most fun eureka stories, it’s a fib11). 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 Morse, who discovered that coiling wire12) would strengthen electromagnetic induction13). Of Morse’s key contribution—the application of Henry’s electromagnets to boost signal strength—Lemley writes that “it is not even clear that he fully understood how that contribution worked.”