Sunday, September 23, 2012 Timothy Wu: On the Archetype of the
Heroic Inventor Over the twentieth century, most innovation
theorists and historians became somewhat skeptical of the
importance of creation stories like [Alexander] Bell's. These
thinkers came to believe that the archetype of the heroic
inventor had been over-credited in the search for a compelling
narrative. As William Fisher puts it, "Like the romantic ideal
of authorship, the image of the inventor has proved
distressingly durable." These critics undeniably have a point:
even the most startlingly inventions are usually arrived at,
simultaneously, by two or more people. If that's true, how
singular could the genius of the inventor really be? There could
not be a better example than the story of the telephone itself.
On the very day that Alexander graham Bell was registering his
invention, another man, Elisha Gray, was also at the patent
office filing for the very same breakthrough [Note: Consequently
many books have been dedicated to the questio