
Beware the Inventor - noodle
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/02/12/beware-the-inventor/
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nostrademons
And yet, those who followed the advice in this pamphlet did much better than
those who didn't. Because it wasn't Coppersmith who got rich off the
telephone, it was Alexander Graham Bell and his investors, some 10 years
later.

It's like the dot-com boom. The people who said it was all a bubble may have
been wrong in the long term, but they preserved their capital to invest
another day. At least some of them bought back in after prices collapsed in
2002 (I know I did). Many of the folks who've made real fortunes on the
Internet didn't do so in the first dot com boom, they did it in the second,
after the initial irrational exuberance had worn off.

Beware the inventor, because the popularizer usually steals his idea and makes
all the money.

------
kragen
<http://www.concernedconnections.org/manuscript/chap066.html> says:

 _In his book, Telephone, The First Hundred Years, John Brooks describes a
rumor that circulated in New York City a decade before the 1877 invention by
Alexander Graham Bell. As the story goes, a man named Joshua Coppersmith, was
convicted of fraud "for exhibiting a device which he said was capable of
transmitting a human voice over metal wires." Most people at that time thought
the idea to be outlandish, and Coppersmith a charlatan. Mr. Brooks states,
however, "...the significant thing is that there is no official record or
evidence of any kind that Coppersmith ever existed".67_

The interesting thing is that (according to this random web page, according to
the book) the rumor _really did_ predate Bell's and Elisha Gray's inventions
by some years.

------
gravitycop
More, of same, here: <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions>

