I doubt there was a single inventor, of course. More like an evolution. But it allows application of work from torque, and that is an incredible invention.
I should clarify that I wasn't crediting ENIAC with the computer as a whole. IBM was a major government contractor and used defense funding to propel the mainstream adaptation of digital and programmable computers for government applications as they had been doing so with analog computing for decades prior (that got them in hot water when they contracted with the German government in the 1930s). IBM's emphasis on digital and programmable computers was what I was attributing to government funding for R&D is what led to the eventual innovation that became household computers. And it's like giving DaVinci credit for the Wright Brothers. Sure, propeller driven flight was inevitable but what the Wright Brothers did can't be discounted because somebody thought of it. It's all part of the process, of course, and both parties deserve rightful credit.
There will be fewer and fewer things that will be invented by a singular person. The jet engine, lightbulb, computer, etc each have lineages that go back to the 15-1600s. Inventions now are an enormous team effort that usually start with academic and peer-reviewed papers drawing out a hypothetical that will get formalized years or decades later when the technology supports the proposition that is itself an amalgamation of academic studying and daydreaming that has been cataloged.
Yes. But when I think of inventions, I almost always thing of machines and not techniques. But agriculture is the single most important advancement in human history, bar none.
Well, I find the best miss use for a plow is a roughshod right when the field is wet. Careful for the mud, though.
I don't know that I like the Wright Brothers example. They solved a problem that had been around for years that nobody could solve. There really was never anything like that in the progression of the computer.
What is "agriculture", though? What's the scope of it, in other words, and how many individual inventions does it entail? That's almost like speaking of the importance of "music" or "transportaion" or "balls depth".
I guess you could argue that agriculture as a field was an innovation not an actual invention. The plow was an invention within it, as you were alluding to.
Maybe he modernized it... he certainly didnt invent this method. Though academic and peer-reviewed studies didn't exist, they were formalities of the traditional European process of academic documentation. What he was was a brilliant businessman that perfected intellectual theft and fraud as well as using politics to discredit competitors.
It was proving principles that had already been posited though. Again, not discrediting them but all inventions in the modern era start out as ideas that are defended and then later proven.
I don't know of an innovation-as-the-product operation prior to Edison. He was essentially a professional patent troll.* And that isn't a bad thing. A lot of great research came from it. That's all Edison was doing. Inventing for the sake of inventing, not for the sake of putting products to market that incorporate those inventions. And I don't know of anyone who was doing it before him. That's what I meant by "the business model". *Whoever was in charge of the "let's make 'patent troll' a thing" campaign did a seriously good job. What's great is that every company that at one point or another badmouths patent trolls or goes to congress seeking legislative protection from their eviiiiiil is at least partially a patent troll themselves. If a company is allocating money to R&D and isn't putting all those developments to market, they're trolling with them (assuming they got patent rights on them, which they did....IBM is the best patent troll ever. Try to sue IBM for patent infringement. I dare you. I double dare you. They'll pull 20 of their patents out of a drawer that they own and that you infringe on, and then they'll tell you that's just a starting point.**) **Just the tip?
Is it that easy to say that? I mean, there were many many attempted flying machines, and all were posited. If a concept had been concocted that would have definitely worked based on the engineering analysis of how it was supposed to work, then it just would have been built and flown. Perhaps the exception to this is the Da Vinci flying machine, but did the Wright Brothers know about that? Was that public knowledge at the time?
