Louis Le Prince
&gt; He has been credited as the &quot;Father of Cinematography&quot; but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing at least in part to the great secrecy surrounding it.<p>Maybe someone with more historical knowledge can correct me but I was a little surprised to read how little influence Robert Goddard had on modern rocketry — at least from reading Wiley Ley&#x27;s &quot;Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel&quot; (1957). Of course Ley can be accused of bias since he was (from Wikipedia) &quot;one of the first members of Germany&#x27;s amateur rocket group, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt&quot;. At the same time, growing up in the U.S., I would not be surprised if a patriotic bias would also lead to over-representing our own Robert Goddard in our history books.<p>I can&#x27;t deny the contrast between the secrecy of Goddard&#x27;s work in the U.S. when compared to the openness and sharing of the amateur rocket group in Germany. Goddard seemed unable to develop a reliable means to supply the fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber while the German rocket group brought all their shared ideas and abilities to bear on creating, at last, the reaction-powered centrifugal pump that made all the difference in the world.<p>It always struck me as a kind of loose analogy to closed vs. open source.<p>At the same time, the analogy falls down with regard to cinematography as Edison was not known as an open collaborator and yet he &quot;won&quot;.<p>Also, perhaps Goddard was cursed as well to have been born just a bit too early (he died the day after the bomb was dropped on Nakasaki, just as WWII was ending, too soon to see the fruits of what the Allies would bring back from Peenemünde).