Beware the Inventor

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.

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.

More, of same, here: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions