Is there a reason we almost never hear of “great inventors” anymore, but rather the companies and the CEOs said inventions were made under?

Question

Is there a reason we almost never hear of “great inventors” anymore, but rather the companies and the CEOs said inventions were made under?

In: 5024

Answer 1

I’m not an inventor, but I’m cited on a dozen or so patents by people I’ve helped out with.

The idea that there was this “golden age” of invention is a fallacy. With enough time, stories of inventors get simplified so much that the story boils down to “John Smith invented this from scratch”. In reality, inventors *always* have teams directly supporting them and centuries of other inventors that they depended on. A patent I worked on for a 3D printing technique wouldn’t be possible without decades of other researchers and designers making small innovations leading up to it. We like to think inventors are lone geniuses working to spontaneously create something, but progress is always a small, incremental, team effort.

The reason people think there were “great inventors” only in the past is that over time, survivorship bias forgets the inventors that weren’t great. Same answer as “what happened to that good classic rock”, or “why did politicians use to be so noble”, or “what happened to chivalry”. Every one of these questions has been asked over and over throughout history because the past always looks more historic than today.