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Re: American Inventor reality TV show
The show will be entertaining, but I think it falls into the trap of thinking that lone inventors are some sort of american icon
very few 'inventors' make any money off their ideas. The wealth of knowledge and technology advances we have seen in the last 100+ years has mostly come from people who got a formal education and worked together with a team of other people, very often under the wing of a corporation or university.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Coming up with a way to implement those ideas, finding the capitol and production volume to turn them into a marketable product, then seeing it through production, marketing, sales, tech support... thats not something you are going to get from a TV network.
For examples: do you know the name of the man who invented television? He was a lone inventor: P.T. Farnsworth. He died broke.
The man who created the operating system that B.Gates purchased for a song, made a few tweaks to and called it MSDOS? I forget his name, he died several years ago, also broke.
Even simple things, like the guy who came up with the idea for intermittant windshield wipers. The car manufacturers ignored his patents for years, and he spent 20 years in the courts fighting them before he got a single dime.
The idea of the great american inventor is a myth. Even Edison had a corporation with hundreds of scientists and technicans working for him.
Another example: when I was a teenager in the early '70s my father told me he had this idea for an electric car, that would have a small bank of batteries, and a small gas engine (like a lawn mower engine) to keep the batteries charged while you were driving. I laughed and told him he was crazy.
In the late 70's some people did convert small cars to this configuration on their own, and they were getting 70mpg.
and its taken another 25 years for these hybrid-electric cars to finally hit mass production.
having the idea is not enough. You also must have:
- the educational background to know whether you idea is feasible
- the ability to explain your idea to people with the resources to take it to the next step
- credibility: an engineering degree is good, a tinfoil hat collection is bad :^)
- the knowledge and training to make the system work
- the business savy to turn a new system into a marketable product
Last edited by KenWittlief : 21-11-2005 at 13:23.
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