I think a valid part of the question of who invented something is "who built the first working device" - describing something in theory and building working device are not the same thing.
AG Bell wasn't the first one to conceptually invent the telephone, he was among the first (along with Elisha Gray) in making practical working telephone and later a practical working telephone system.
So, who invented the Satellite then? What about the steam engine? The helicopter?
Sometimes the inventors are so far ahead of their time that the materials science first has to catch up (in some cases only a few millenia) before they can realize their devices. Effectively it is then the first person after whoever did the materials science part to create the device that gets to claim the invention.
So we get Sikorski, and not Da Vinci.
We get Arthur C. Clarke who claims the 'communications satellite' even though the moon was there all along and the Sputnik was the first working very crude device (it was one way only, it said 'you lost the space race' in a single bit of message).
We get Newcomen, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (I had to look that up, I can never remember the man's full name), and Hero of Alexandria competing for the steam engine title, with all of them holding some part of the credit.
Pointing at an inventor is hard, and 'who built the first working device' is one way of doing this but it assumes a singular effort whereas most things are team efforts and misses the bit that the idea itself can be an instrumental step in getting your 'true' inventor to make their claim, standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. In isolation, we all probably would invent the hammer in our lifetimes, if that.
Savery is referenced in the "Watt steam engine" Wikipedia article.
Also worth noting that even though Watt improved on Newcomen's design to improve efficiency, Watt's design still sucked: it took Wilkinson's boring technology to actually get them to work well.
Ah yes, and a better claim than some (there are quite a few more).
I always wondered what the effect of these in absolute time is. Consider: if someone had come up with a viable steam engine in the year 1000 or so, how would that have change the course of history?
I remember reading an analysis of that a while back but I can't remember where I saw it. The upshot was that the industrial revolution turned on more than just innovation, it also required just the right combination of natural resources (coal) and economic conditionsL deforestation in England driving the use of coal for heat, which drove mining, which drove the need for pumps, which made Savery's engine economically viable. Before that steam power would not have found an application.
Also, the piston and cylinder (which came later) were derived from canon-making technology, so that had to come first too.
I remembered the same article too, I'm sure I could have found it again knowing it was listed on HN and/or recalling the wording. Good article too, going in depth on steam engines - the first ones were so inefficient they had to be really close to a really cheap source of fuel and be useful.
> t also required just the right combination of natural resources (coal) and economic conditionsL deforestation
This argument is repeated often, but I don't think it's really true. Both Savery and Newcomen's engines were initially aimed at evacuating flooded metal mines and not coal mines.
"A few Savery pumps were tried in mines, an unsuccessful attempt being made to use one to clear water from a pool called Broad Waters in Wednesbury (then in Staffordshire) and nearby coal mines."
That is correct, but the article explicitly addresses this point and argues that the evidence points to Lilienfeld producing a working transistor.
"Later, some people claimed that Lilienfeld did not implement his ideas since "high-purity materials needed to make such devices work were decades away from being ready,"[CHLI] but the 1991 thesis by Bret Crawford offered evidence that "these claims are incorrect."[CRA91] Lilienfeld was an accomplished experimenter, and in 1995, Joel Ross[ROS95] "replicated the prescriptions of the same Lilienfeld patent. He was able to produce devices that remained stable for months."[ARN98] Also, in 1981, semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman confirmed that "Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many occasions".[EMM13]"
For many things (computers, rocketry, aerospace, etc.) and different reasons, Germany in the years around the second world war, was a pretty bad place to get international credit for your accomplishments.
"It was able to squeak, but not to speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused to transmit one intelligible sentence." [0]
"A translation of Legat's article on Reis' invention was obtained by Thomas Edison prior to his filing his patent application on a telephone in 1877. In correspondence of 1885, Edison credits Reis as having invented "the first telephone", with the limitation that it was "only musical not articulating"." [1]
Fascinating stuff nonetheless, these inventors and their ideas... See also previous experimenters [2]
Yeah - though Bell's first apparatus wasn't much better - the invention of the carbon microphone is what really what set the telephone on to being a practical device. The rest of it was trying to build a network to connect people - and that was really hard (and capital intensive).
What blows my mind that we absolutely take for granted today is insulated wires. The technology and supply chain to mine or to find into metal and also to farm cotton and wool and formed that into protective tubing before the advent of plastic insulation. The amount of technology that goes into making a "simple" USB-cable beggars belief if you stop to think about it. Even a simple #2 wooden pencil with an eraser on top is beyond the knowledge of one person to produce, nevermind a USB-c cable!
In Victorian London, electricity was distributed around the home using bare wires with an air gap. It was 32v though.
Later it was superseded with lead wrapped in paper, until the Knob and Tube system. This comprised of single-insulated copper conductors installed within walls and ceilings, this wiring was encased in porcelain insulating tubes with cloth-lined sleeves.
One knob for Live and one knob for Neutral. The wires were held in place by porcelain knobs nailed to the house frame. Where wires passed through wood framing, they were threaded through porcelain tubes to prevent them from contacting the wood.
My house once had knob and tube wiring. Over the past 15 years I have replaced most of what I assume is the second-generation cloth-covered wiring (which dates back to the 40s, 50s, and 60s). Every once in a while, I come across the insulators from an older electrical system, but most of the wire that went with those insulators was pulled out long ago. The only remains are short bits of wire that were wrapped around the insulators.
I have a cable here that is interesting. When I first saw it I thought how strange, a cable that is multi-stranded bare wire for this application (connecting a camera). Then I looked at it under a microscope and realized not only is it insulated wire, it is shielded wire. Mindblowing. I pity the people that have to handle that stuff.
Small addendum: at least in Germany, early telephone wires (up until the 1950s?) were wrapped in paper, drenched in oil. The bundles were then enclosed in a lead-copper alloy to protect them from moisture.
Reminds me of the (not entirely accurate) story of someone trying to make a cheeseburger from scratch and realizing it required most of modern civilization.
To some degree, this is a consequence of the nature of the field you're working in:
* if the physics is so completely understood that you can confidently predict something will work from your sofa, and give an error-free recipe to build it, you indeed can invent from theory... but how deep can this invention be if the problems of the field are completely solved?
* if you are working in a field at the edge of human understanding, you cannot have the confidence in your ideas without having tested them experimentally; a theoretician makes at most a minor contribution to the actual inventions being realized, because he's producing - most likely somewhat wrong - hypotheses.
This latter kind of "theoretical" inventions are heavily subject to survivorship bias. Fifteen competent theoreticians make different predictions - all according to best, though incomplete, model of the world; a successful experiment validates exactly one of them, and we end up exalting the lucky winner as the "inventor".
In practice, any unexplored corner of the field will contain surprises; these will require extra theoretical development to cover.
Usually things like imperfect understanding of materials get in the way. Pretty much the reason you need both theory and experiment to make progress in every single area of matter-based technology (i.e. not software).
I had that thought too, describing that something might be physically possible isn't really inventing it, you have to build (and arguably sell) the device too. Re-organizing someone else's equations and saying it's technically possible is maybe enough to publish a paper but certainly doesn't rise to the standard of inventing in my mind
There's something to be said that mass production is another distinct stage of invention. Karl Benz may have invented the first internal combustion engine car, and plenty more built cars by hand for the rich, but Henry Ford made cars anyone could have for cheap.
I agree with that. It is a bit like the idea that having an idea for a startup is less important than the ability to get it to a level where investors might be interested.
A while ago there was an artical posted here about all the world changing inventions that came out of Bell Labs. It was easy to show for most of them that they weren't the actual inventor, and in many cases not even the first producer. They were the first to make it practical for mass production, however.
AG Bell wasn't the first one to conceptually invent the telephone, he was among the first (along with Elisha Gray) in making practical working telephone and later a practical working telephone system.