Authors:
Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Historic Theme:
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November 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 7
Nice Work If You Can Keep It
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
The usual image of invention is of the solitary genius struggling in his garret with an idea only he has faith in. One day, he shouts, “Eureka!” and the world changes. Sometimes this is actually the case. Thomas Edison, after all, was entitled to shout, “Eureka!” more than a thousand times in his life, although I doubt that he did.
In the modern era, however, most great inventions are under development for long periods of time, sometimes generations, before someone solves the last piece of the puzzle and becomes “the inventor.” Dozens of individuals were struggling with heavier-than-air flight at the turn of the century, but it was the Wright brothers (so close to each other as nearly to be a solitary genius) who solved the last major problem, turning. Their insight was to realize that airplanes turn in three dimensions, not two, as does land- or seabound transportation, and they devised a means to allow the aircraft to do so while maintaining stability: wing warping. That was enough, however. They did indeed invent the airplane, for theirs was the first one that worked.
But many of the most important inventions had no inventors at all. It was known as early as the sixteenth century, for instance, that when a wagon is placed on rails, a draft animal (or, often, a human being) can haul much heavier loads. It is not known who first had the idea of using a steam engine instead of a horse or mule to pull the wagon, and it was only in 1797 that Richard Trevithick developed a steam engine powerful enough to do so. Trevithick’s locomotive, however, required a toothed rail to operate, such as that which cog railways still use on steep mountain slopes. Then, William Hedley in 1813 built Puffing Billy, which relied on friction for traction. Finally, in 1829, George Stephenson built the Rocket—much more powerful than previous locomotives, thanks to its tubular boiler—and solved a myriad of practical engineering problems in designing the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the first commercially successful railroad.
In our own time, the computer had a thousand fathers, from Charles Babbage in the early nineteenth century to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 1970s and 1980s, before it was ready to sit on half the desks in the country.
The automobile, too, had many contributors, from Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, who first conceived the idea of a self-propelled vehicle, to Nikolaus Otto, who built the first practical four-cycle engine in 1862, Wilhelm Maybach, who invented the carburetor in 1893, and Henry Ford, who introduced the assembly line in 1914.
But, unlike the other inventions, which evolved rather than sprang into being from the mind of a single genius, the automobile was patented in its entirety, and by someone who never even built one, George B. Selden. Had he been able to make the patent stick, he would have been FORBES-Four-Hundred rich. As it was, given