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
The revolutionary stuff that people could invent by themselves, on their own resources, was low-hanging fruit that has already been picked. The stuff above it requires teams of people working in laboratories/workshops that can’t be attributed to a single inventor. The physics and technology required to truly make something nobody else made before is just no longer trivial.
People are still investing things, but they are in very niche settings and very niche inventions that you need to know the field to understand. You don’t hear about them becaue they rarely have people making social media buzz about their work. Steve Wozniak is attributed several inventions but most people hear about Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
The other thing to keep in mind is marketing/propaganda. The myth of the genius inventor that creates one revolutionary new invention after another is exactly that: a myth created to flatter their own egos and shine their own business (as well as sell newspapers). Edison is notorious for this but he was not at all the only one before and since.
There weren’t many great inventors to begin with. [Great man theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory) is bullshit. Instead people incrementally improve upon previous discoveries. That’s how various countries claim firsts, they get tricky with the definition. The Wright brothers were far from the to built planes, Edison only found a new filament and (analog) computers go back two millennia.
Beyond that, education and population numbers increased to a degree that [multiple discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery) (people make the same discoveries independently) has become a “problem” for the Nobel committee.
Interestingly, this seems to have been a thing historically too. When I lived in South Korea, the people there often used to tell me that King Sejong (1418–1450) invented their ‘alphabet’ (hanguel) and records say as such. It’s assumed that it wasn’t him *personally* though, but various scholars. A lot of other inventions from a lower class associate of his are commonly attributed to him too, such as a water clock, but the records do show it wasn’t him.
Diminishing returns. Our science and technology has advanced so much that individual breakthroughs are very difficult if not impossible, as in order to be in the cutting edge of a field you must work with big teams, you are not likely to be able to do anything significant by doing it on your own in your basement.
Because a lot of those “great inventors” actually just took the credit for someone elses work. Edison for example took a lot of credit for things others discovered under his payroll and then sued everyone else. It has always been the rich CEO taking the credit for his workers inventions and successes.
Two things.
Not all inventors credited with their inventions actually invented them and things have become more complex and one person no longer is able to have enough knowledge and money to invent stuff.
Because new things to invent are increasingly complex systems that require more than one individual to work on. All the great inventors took the low hanging fruit.
Because people don’t invent things in their backyard anymore, they dont have the tools. You can’t just fire up the particle accelerator in your back yard and make breakthru discoveries in physics. Because someone else owns and funds it all they take the credit.
Big collaboration. The Nobel committees are having problems because it is limited to three persons per prize.
The 19th and to an extent the 20th Century saw an industrial revolution that led to a lot of people inventing cool physical things powered by steam and electricity. Our age is more of a digital revolution. Our big inventions tend to be computer programs and specifically the algorithms that power them. These are often less exciting and harder to understand than physical inventions and thus less romanticized. However, they have a low barrier to monetize compared to physical things because algorithms don’t have to be manufactured, so the inventors can more readily become CEOs. One example is Larry Page, who invented a smarter search engine that found more relevant results on the internet more quickly. He turned it into Google and became crazy wealthy.
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