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Comment by gmarx | Hacker News Reader

For Edison and Ford at least I guess a lot of those later patents were done by underlings and the boss man put hsi name on it. I couldn't tell if the analysis accounted for that

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> For Edison and Ford at least I guess a lot of those later patents were done by underlings and the boss man put hsi name on it.

In principle, the rules for inventorship for patents differ substantially from the rules for authorship in academic papers: Inventorship is determined by law, authorship is determined by, well, custom.

eg: http://www.unemed.com/blog/how-to-determine-who-is-an-invent...

You're probably right, but the articles I've read suggests that Ford and Edison continued tinkering and working right up to the end. Edison was in his 30's when he invented the light bulb and the phonograph. He was in his 40's when he invented the motion picture camera and made a bunch of improvements to battery technology. I've read stories that Ford was still tinkering with engine technology when he was in his 60's and 70's.

Edison didn't invent the lightbulb by any means. [1] In fact, the lightbulb didn't really have much of a singular inventor - it was a gradual and independent research process. Edison has the credit of addressing the shortcomings in previous lightbulb designs so as to make mass commercial production feasible.

[1] http://www.bulbs.com/learning/history.aspx

Edison didn't invent the motion picture camera either:

"The first motion-picture camera was invented by the Frenchman Louis Le Prince in the 1880s, while working in Leeds, England."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film_technology

I recently had the chance to view the exhibit on the light bulb in the Smithsonian, and learned something I hadn't known before: the big advance Edison made in light bulbs was a less bright light bulb. Previous electric lights were too blinding to use in most applications. Edison's light bulbs were easy on the eyes. When he helped wire up the Library of Congress, he insisted that all of the bulbs be left bare, so you could marvel in their non-blinding beauty.

Well that's probably even more analogous to modern-day tech startups, few of which actually invent anything new themselves.

The point is that Edison led hard, consequential engineering work well past his 20s and 30s.

By he also stole some patents from Tesla. Not every modern-day start-up is doing that.

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