What sort of scientific Scrooge chooses to take his invention to the grave like that? What has he gained in the end?
Nothing. Most dead people, not matter what they "achieved" in life, gain nothing in the end. They are just dead.
The idea that your goal in life is to leave a "legacy" is not universal. Life happens as it happens. Apparently for this "scientific Scrooge" it didn't happen in a way that enabled him to share his invention, so when the time came, he just took his invention to the grave.
Same thing most likely happened numerous times in history with inventions, works of art and other "legacy items" we never heard about...
I cant find the notes I made now, but essentially I ended up deciding that something so revolutionary, if proved and accepted as doing what it said on the tin, would take a life of its own. I came to the conclusion that once people know of its existence, the inventor will lose all control and become an instant target. Such inventions are the "babies" of such inventors, so loss of control is an issue. Becoming a target, more so. I'm not sure what the people who did the science that lead to nuclear stuff intended or thought, but if it were me, the idea that my science was used to make such evil devices as nuclear bombs would at the very least cause me trouble.
Interestingly there is some relevance to what is happening now with the NSA internet spying issue. People may well look at this sort of behavior and conclude that there are no limits for certain nation states. So, if a Belgian, for a random small country example, were to invent such technology, and say this person decided that only small poor countries could have access to it in order to equalize small poor countries with rich ones, how might the likes of China, UK, USA, India, etc, react to that? What would be their limit to acquire such technology? The second you deploy such a unit, spies would be all over it. Perhaps, war. So in the end, unless you do as told, your good might end up slaughtering millions.
Now, I'm not saying that starlite was or is for real, or that the inventor thought this way, but I can certainly see why such an inventor might be so paranoid as to get in to a position where the secret dies with him.
Of course I am very open to the idea that this says more about my personal psychology that any general point...
The steam engine, refrigeration, etc, are all examples of this kind of invention which make their inventors quite well off even if eventually eclipsed by successors.
War is inevitable... don't fret over some invention, if it's useful in war it will be used in war regardless of its other merits. Often the tech transfer is backwards, from war to civilian life.
In the story, Shipstone quits his job, retreats to his basement and invents a technology that packs 'more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."'
Like Ward and Musk [1], Shipstone eschews patenting his new technology in order to deny others the opportunity to steal it (or tie him up in court cases) and instead begins manufacturing the devices (eponymously named "Shipstones") which end up becoming ubiquitous, powering everything from flashlights and automobiles, to households and ocean-going ships. The company he founds becomes the largest and most powerful industrial conglomerate in the galaxy and the method of manufacturing Shipstones remains a closely-held secret.
[1: http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11 ]
As a theme only things that can be easily reproduced by looking at the very physical nature are patented. If something is easy to reproduce by just looking at the idea or invention itself, that is the kind of thing that is commonly patented. Why else do you think the patent ecosystem if full of crappiest and most obvious patents possible.
It hardly makes any sense to patent some thing that is genuinely difficult to figure out otherwise.
Look at nuclear technology. Weapons or other wise, super powers and their allies are always paranoid that developing countries may develop nuclear power and all the edge they have in negotiating anything will just go away.
Inventions like things that control vast advances in science and technology are always going to be much about politics and less about altruistic nature of humans to share the inventions with each other.
Fighting bigger wars to prevent small insignificant wars is the common theme these days.
But here nobody actually knows even the ideas behind this - how exactly this thing works. Which sometimes happens too - e.g. see history here about lithium batteries, which was just recently discovered how they work even though they were in use for years. But there nobody knew that, there wasn't some inventor that hides it.
Of course, you could argue that he reacts so badly because they try to trap him there forever...