Mark was musing last night about something he learned at a training seminar. "Who invented the light bulb?" he asked.
Rhetorically, I assumed, staring up at the ceiling (I was putting my feet up after a pretty long day). "I suppose I am supposed to say Thomas Edison."
"Right," said Mark. "So why, then, if Edison invented the light bulb, did he have to buy out the rights to an existing patent for a light bulb?"
"I suppose," I said, "that someone else came up with the idea for the light bulb, and consequently got a patent for it, but never managed to actually make one. At least not one that worked. You don’t have to have a working prototype to get a patent, just the idea."
"So why do we say that Edison invented the light bulb?" pressed Mark. "Why don’t we say that he improved on the light bulb?"
"Or engineered it? Or marketed it? Or made money off it? Where are you going with this?" I asked.
"Could it be," he speculated dramatically, "because the original patent was a Canadian patent?!"
"Is that so?"
"Yes!"
"I don’t really care. Who cares who had the patent? They didn’t do anything with it. Edison tried something like hundreds of different designs, with different filaments."
"Still," insisted Mark, "the word inventor isn’t appropriate."
"Are you suggesting that the light bulb myth is an example of American exceptionalism?" I asked. He indicated that, yes, he did.
"Because I don’t think so," I said. "I think it’s an example of our need to have the myth of the inventor."
"Ah yes," Mark said. "The single inventor."
"We have to have a hero," I continued. "We have to have a single person that we can pin the whole thing on. Nobody ever improves on the work of previous people."
"Nothing is ever developed, by, say, a committee."
"Yes. James Watt," I raised my voice as Mark left the kitchen in search of a broom and dustpan, "JAMES WATT, AND NO ONE ELSE, INVENTED THE STEAM ENGINE. Philo T. Farnsworth invented the television. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. And so on, and so on. And why do you think this is?" I continued. "We need to believe that science, engineering really, is the work of heroes. Geniuses!"
"Who sit in their laboratory until the inspiration strikes, and then… they invent something." Mark shook his head. "It gives people wrongheaded ideas about how engineering works."
"When really, everything — just about — that is invented, I mean developed, engineered, is part of a whole chain of innovation. But we only pick out the most prominent person in the chain, whether they’re some rich guy who funded the project, or the one who got interviewed on the news, or just the most personable of a whole bevy of potential ‘inventors.’"
"Yeah — And ‘inventor’ hardly describes the most significant role that Edison played. He founded a company. General Electric."
"But ‘company founder’ doesn’t sound as snappy." We sat in silence for a while. "I blame elementary school teachers, I think. Everything’s got to be so simplified."
Later we decided that the whole myth of the inventor comes from the same sort of simplification and desire for a tidy, engaging story that gives us, say, patriotic legends about American historical figures (e.g., Washington/cherry tree, Lincoln/log cabin). The secular hagiography, I call it.
(Mark liked that term, but it ended our conversation, because he went off on a tangent trying to come up with a good line about "I’m writing my autohagiography.")
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