6 Inventions Often Credited to the Wrong Person
There’s nothing more frustrating than working your socks off only to see someone else get all the credit for your efforts. Spare a thought, then, for the minds behind some of history’s most significant innovations, who, despite months, years, or in some cases lifetimes of work, find someone else’s name ignominiously attached to their invention.
Sometimes inventions are miscredited in the public consciousness simply because a more famous name becomes associated with the creation. For example, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford — two of modern history’s most well-known innovators — are often credited with things they didn’t actually invent, through no fault of their own. Then there are the more insidious misattributions. In some instances, an idea has been copied or outright stolen, robbing the true inventor of their glory; in others, a more senior or prominent member of a team is given credit despite not coming up with the original idea. See, for example, the Matilda effect, in which notable discoveries made by women have often been misattributed to the men they worked with.
Here are some notable inventions in history that are frequently credited to the wrong person, from the flush toilet to the iPod.
The Flush Toilet
No name in the history of toilets is more famous than that of plumber Thomas Crapper, partly because his name appeared on the once-ubiquitous Crapper brand of toilets, and partly because Crapper is a humorously appropriate name for a toilet (the slang word “crap” existed before Thomas Crapper). Crapper, however, did not invent the flushing device with which he is so associated. He did patent the U-bend and floating ballcock — key components of the modern toilet — in the late 1880s, but he never held a patent for the flush toilet. Much earlier, in 1596, John Harington, an English courtier and the godson of Queen Elizabeth I, described what can be considered the first flush toilet, which involved a 2-foot-deep bowl and a massive 7.5 gallons of water per flush. (Only two working models were made, one in Haringon’s own home and one in Queen Elizabeth’s palace.) The first patent for a flushable toilet was granted to the Scottish inventor Alexander Cumming in 1775.
The Telescope
The Italian polymath Galileo Galilei is often credited with inventing the telescope, and it’s easy to see why. He gave birth to modern astronomy with his telescope-assisted discoveries about our moon, the moons of Jupiter, and other celestial bodies. Galileo made his first telescope in 1609 after hearing about the “perspective glasses” being made in the Netherlands. But the first person to apply for a patent for a telescope was Dutch eyeglass-maker Hans Lippershey in 1608, a year before Galileo. His telescope could magnify objects only three times, but it was nonetheless a landmark in the history of optics. (By comparison, by the end of 1609, Galileo had developed a telescope that magnified objects 20 times.) Whether Lippershey should be credited as the inventor of the telescope remains an open debate, as it is entirely possible that others created similar devices before he filed his patent.
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The Lightbulb
Thomas Edison is often — and incorrectly — given all the credit for inventing the lightbulb. But the lightbulb was actually the result of a process that began before Edison was even born. In 1802, English chemist Humphry Davy used a voltaic pile (invented by Alessandro Volta, after whom the volt is named) to create the first “electric arc lamp” between charcoal electrodes. His rudimentary lamp was too bright and burned out too quickly, but it was nonetheless an important breakthrough. Other scientists worked to refine the lightbulb, but problems with filaments and batteries made these early bulbs impractical for everyday use. In 1860, English physicist Joseph Swan developed a primitive electric light that utilized a filament of carbonized paper in an evacuated glass bulb. Lack of a good vacuum and an adequate electric source ultimately made it inefficient, but it did pave the way for later innovations, including those by Edison. Edison purchased some of his predecessor’s patents, improved upon them, and came up with his own lightbulb, which, while not the first overall, was the first to be commercially viable.
The Automobile
One commonly held misconception is that Henry Ford invented the automobile. In reality, the development of the automobile can be traced back to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, a French military engineer who, in 1769, built a steam-powered tricycle for hauling artillery. Due to its steam-powered nature, not everyone accepts Cugnot’s invention as the first true auto. Instead, that distinction often goes to vehicles made by two Germans, Karl Friedrich Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, who — working entirely separately — developed their own gasoline-powered automobiles in 1886, in two different German cities. Benz actually drove his three-wheeled vehicle in 1885, and it is regarded as the first practical modern automobile and the first commercially available car in history. As for Henry Ford, his name is forever remembered in auto history for the Model T, which he mass-produced using an innovative moving assembly line, making automobiles available to middle-class Americans.
Monopoly
Since the 1930s, it’s been common knowledge that Charles Darrow invented Monopoly, an idea that both he and the game’s manufacturer, Parker Brothers, freely propagated (it was printed in the instructions for decades). But it’s not quite true. Darrow got the idea for the game — which made him a millionaire — from a left-wing feminist named Elizabeth Magie. Magie created and patented an early version of Monopoly, called The Landlord’s Game, in 1903, about three decades before Darrow. Darrow learned about the game from a couple who had played it in Atlantic City (which is where many of the game’s street names come from) and made a few changes: The original game included a wealth tax, public utilities, and was designed as a protest against the big monopolists of her time. It had two sets of rules, one that allowed players to create monopolies and crush their opponents, and an anti-monopolist version that rewarded all players when wealth was created (the latter demonstrating what Magie believed to be a morally superior path). It’s only in recent years that Magie has started to receive the credit for inventing one of the world’s most popular and iconic board games.
The iPod
Portable digital audio players have existed since the mid-1990s, but it was Apple’s iPod that revolutionized the industry upon its release in 2001. Yet it wasn’t the engineers at Apple who invented the iPod — not entirely, at least. British inventor Kane Kramer actually developed the technology behind the iPod as far back as 1979. His credit card-sized music player, which looked very similar to the iPod, could store only 3.5 minutes of music, but he was sure the storage capacity would increase over time. Unfortunately for Kramer, internal problems at his company ultimately led to his patent lapsing, at which point the technology became public. Apple later acknowledged Kramer’s involvement in inventing the technology behind the iPod.
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