List: The world’s best inventions weren’t made for profit.
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1. The internet. (The government & Tim Berners-Lee.)
2. The computer - “This came from pure scientific thought, and not at all from an economic need for computing. Business and profit-making played no part in it.”
— turing.org.uk
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3. Penicillin.
“Florey believed it would be inappropriate to patent penicillin, but learned his lesson when some of his American collaborators did just that… Florey took no profit for himself.”
— time.com
4. AC power & modern electricity. (Tesla)
“Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.”
— Tesla (wikiquote.org)
“Yet Tesla died destitute.”
— inventors.about.com
5. Phone.
“Meucci was recognized as the first inventor of the telephone by the US House.” “[He] was unable to raise sufficient funds to pay for the patent application… In 1861 his cottage was auctioned.”
— wikipedia.org
6. Lightbulb.
“Göbel [invented] the first practical bulb… in 1854, a quarter of a century before Edison’s patent.”
— wikipedia.org
Yes he died pennyless too.
7. Radio.
“Tesla is now credited with inventing modern radio as well; since the Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s patent in 1943 in favor of Tesla’s earlier patents.”
— inventors.about.com
8. Almost everything else - through state funding of science, medicine, & university research.
The point? While we all love for-profit economics, let’s not exaggerate their role either. At best they tend to succeed after government acceleration of new technologies.
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Darren Allen says:
Great List!
May 2, 2008 at 1:09 amOskar says:
“Not able to make profit” IS NOT the same to “Not made to make profit”. All those thing you listed were made with the intention to make profit. For example, Meucci tried very hard to patent and sell his idea.
Author response: Filing for a patent doesn’t mean trying to profit, you could patent something to prevent others from patenting it. (and give away licenses for free.)
Second, this site was posted on some far-right websites, they’re not civil:
May 2, 2008 at 4:41 amSpock says:
Did a 4 year old write this list? The internet was developed to reduce cost by allowing instant electronic transfer of information. Reducing cost is a business practice used to increase profit. Everything Tesla invented was meant to make profit, but the man had the social skills of Hans Reiser. He could not put together the whole package the way Edison did. Inability to make profit does not imply not intending to. Penicillin was not meant for profit by the man who did not patent it. The irony there is if he had patented the drug, he could have prevented his partners from selling it for profit. And what kind of item is #7. “Almost everything else?” The internal combustion engine? The microchip? The door knob? Unbelievable…
May 2, 2008 at 6:58 amrekroc says:
You free-market types are really something. If you had the ability to think beyond the wallets parked against your asses, you’d see that your “more profit = more motivation/less profit = less motivation” ideology is complete BS. Yes, that ideology certainly applies to the multitudes of snake oil salesmen in the world, but not to the people who actually create great things.
Creative types create mostly because it’s what they enjoy doing, and they will create no matter what the payoff happens to be.
May 2, 2008 at 7:02 amThe Pythian Legume says:
The mistake you’re making is to equate money with profit. They are not the same. Money is a tool of exchange. You receive it for something your produce with the assumption that you’ll be able to exchange it for goods others have produced. Profit is the value you get on the investment you staked your money and mind on. It’s getting value for something you’ve produced that has value to others. As the other have commented, being unable to make a profit is not the same as having no desire or value to make a profit. Had Tesla had any business smarts, he would have secured patents, made massive profits that would have allowed him to carry his research much further, as opposed being dependent on grants from others. As for number 8, that’s got to be a joke. If you honestly compared the return on investment you get from all the money that is spent on schools, you’d realize that if schools were businesses they would have gone bankrupt long ago.
May 2, 2008 at 7:35 amputtputt says:
“Yet Tesla died destitute.”
AND DO YOU THINK THIS IS A GREAT THING YOU STUPID COMMUNIST!?
So you’re saying it’s a great thing that inventors die destitute?
May 8, 2008 at 11:54 pmwtfruon says:
The government & Tim Berners-Lee.
Really? “The government” CERN can take credit, and thats made up of governments who are members of cern.
What a fucktard website: stumbleupon, you failed me.
May 9, 2008 at 1:39 pmMemnon says:
Wow, there are some seriously messed up people making comments here… personally, I thought it was an interesting read.
May 10, 2008 at 3:13 pmAnnon. says:
I agree with Memnon. Some people need to really chill out.
May 11, 2008 at 11:04 amRubab says:
Interesting
May 11, 2008 at 5:29 pmLast Redoubt says:
I think it was an interesting read as well. There is a difference between making money and making a profit. Back when I went to college, “profit” was a bad word. Gougers make a profit. Greedy people make a profit. Successful businesses had adequate “Cash Flow” to make money and keep the business going. But now, sadly, profit is the goal and our current business friendly government has allowed obscene concentrations of wealth in the few to the detriment of us all. Remember this the next time you, or someone you care for, loses their job to outsourcing/imported cheap labor. That company worships profit.
July 13, 2008 at 9:43 amstevek says:
You forgot bifocals and the lightening rod — which had an enormous impact on American agriculture and architecture. Franklin refused to patent any of his inventions, saying he believed they needed to be available for the betterment of mankind.
July 16, 2008 at 8:20 amScott C. says:
“Yet Tesla died destitute.”
AND DO YOU THINK THIS IS A GREAT THING YOU STUPID COMMUNIST!?
Apparently someone hasn’t heard about the invention of “irony.”
July 16, 2008 at 8:31 amdevil_dog21 says:
I think the larger point that was trying to be made here is that inventions tend to happen not from the laborotories of corporations, but from universities and private citizens. For example, the cure for Rickets came not from any pharmeceutical company, but from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The comment about the purpose of the internet is flat wrong. It was created initially to facilitate transfer of data between universities and other non-profit organizations. Business came along later and adapted themselves to use it while at the same time commercializing it. Can you say “pop ups”? Most significant inventions and discoveries come from the non-profit sector and may be purchased or subsidized by for profit companies, but they didn’t actually invent them.
Point being, the desire by conservatives to privatize everything in sight because “business can do it better” is flat wrong.
July 16, 2008 at 8:34 amWord says:
I love the people saying “well you know Telsa may have been brilliant and invented everything for the 20th century, but he did’t have the street smarts to put it all together” Great historical perspective, you really understand how it was turn of the century, huh.
What garbage. I also love how all of a sudden anyone with a hackney knowledge of intro to intro to (twice on purpose, save the comment) economics thinks they have a ubiquitous understanding of not only the extremely complicated market ethos, but also a grasp on what really drives innovation and technological breakthroughs.
July 16, 2008 at 9:34 amBuckeye Nut Schell says:
I believe the point was also made that “through state funding of science, medicine, & university research” all of these inventions were made possible. These are the very institutions that the “so-called” conservatives are trying to cut spending on.
Allow me to ask our neo-capitalistic friends this, “If the United States are to compete globally with countries that are paying their workers pennies a day, then what if not for superior education available to the masses are we to compete with?” We are currently (as of the last rankings I could find) ranked 24 out of 60* industrialized countries studied. 60 percentile, that does not bode well in a global competition.
July 16, 2008 at 9:35 am*Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_international_mathematics_and_science_study
Please! says:
The internet language was developed and maintained by CERN for the transfer of large volumes of data over digital networks, a necessity for modern physics. The internet as we know it was started by the US military and was called ARPANET. And it was meant to insure mutually assured destruction during nuclear war, which makes a little profit look pleasant. I fully support your thinking that for profit research is nonsense and doesn’t really occur, but your facts are really lacking. All research in essence starts off costing lots of money, very few things payoff. That is why we the tax payer foot so much of the bill. You really don’t want companies doing research, if you can cook your books for wall street, think about what you can do for the next pain reliever (remember Celebrex and its competitors).
July 16, 2008 at 9:40 amMudlock says:
“The internet” was an outgrowth of the ARPANET, funded by the US Defense department; true, it wasn’t designed for profit, but it was designed for war. Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, which is not the same thing. It’s true, B-L had to do a lot of convincing to get CERN to give away WWW; but the internet’s history is a bit murkier; I recommend reading the wikipedia article “History of the Internet” (and yes, the real, and significant, contributions of Al Gore are also mentioned there.)
The computer, similarly, was paid for significantly with defense dollars, following Turing’s service in WWII as a cryptologist. (And let’s not forget von Neumann’s desire for a calculating machine for his nuclear bomb design work.)
Penicillian: Fleming’s work began with his WWI care of soldier’s infected wounds.
Tesla didn’t care to be _rich_, but he did need money to continue his experiments. He knew he wasn’t a businessmen, which is why he partnered with George Westinghouse, a famous inventor in his own right, who helped the world with his inventions AND made a mighty profit doing it. He financed AC power and became rich(er) from it, even if Tesla chose not to; Westinghouse didn’t buy into Tesla’s radio ideas, but had he, the only diference would be Westinghouse Inc. would have made the first profits from radio, rather than Marconi Inc.
The Phone: Mueci, I’m sure, would have loved to not die horribly broke. But Bell got lucky, got rich, and made enough cash to survive the lawsuits that ruined Mueci.
Goebel *lost* his case against Edison. His claim that he’d built incandescent bulbs 25 years earlier was found to be fradulent in US Court. But that, and all the other court cases Edison fought, we’re because *everyone* wanted to make money from the idea; altruism doesn’t apply if you just /failed/ to make money.
In summary:
War. War. War. Tesla yes/Westinghouse no. Wrong. Wrong. Tesla. Etc.
July 16, 2008 at 10:07 amWord says:
I also completely forgot the “If you compared the money we invest in our schools and return on investment you get on that and blah blah blah would have been shut down”
Pleas please don’t ever talk/post/write again. Seriously, where you being sarcastic? What exactly are you going on here? Even if we were to do a classical cost-benefit analysis of a school program or curriculum, how are you pegging the benefits? You probably didn’t even think that far since all you were doing was regurgitating some empty talk you heard from other idle-minded dimwits like yourself. Well when people who actually do cost-benefit analysis, especially for public works projects such as schools, take a look at something like this, they do timely and considerate calculations to carefully assign dollar amounts (the very practice which by itself could be thoroughly argued against by any branch of heterodox economics) to seemingly intangibles such as lower-crime rates, higher wages, a greater skilled laborforce, etc, etc.
Your mom should have done a cost-benefit analysis on you. Then maybe we wouldn’t have had to put up with your bullshit here.
July 16, 2008 at 10:08 amDHavok says:
The internet was developed from the ARPANET. ARPANET was developed by the government in order send information to multiple machines in different places at the same time. The US Government, not private enterprise, was motivated to move forward with what was later expanded into the Internet.
Private industry does expand good ideas faster most of the time, but they don’t do a very good job in actually developing them. Another one on the list that proves this, is Penicillin. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t motivated to develop new drugs on their own for major diseases (until a medicine was advertised for it, how many of us heard of Restless Leg Syndrome). Instead, they work with state funded universities to gain research knowledge on some of the more important cures.
You see, the government, when used properly, can do great thing, but like anything man-made and run, it can also be abused. The same can be said for private enterprise as well which is why a mixed market economy, not a free market one, is better for everyone - as shown by the list above and by numerous other examples in the world.
July 16, 2008 at 3:01 pmd p says:
You missed X-Rays.
The discoverer was Wilhelm Roentgen and he made quite sure that the discovery would be available to the whole world.
Tim Berners Lee had nothing to do with the creation of the internet. He did, however, create the WWW, which is “simply” a protocol (http, using TCP/IP or UDP/IP on port 80) on the internet. Many, many other protocols coexist over the ‘net. ARPA (now DARPA), funded the internet. Al Gore did not create it, as many liars have said he said, but he did push for the research that did. The internet was invented to give the military a robust way to communicate. That’s why it’s designed the way it is. Although civilians don’t see the redundancy and ability to reroute around problems, I’m sure the military’s net does. Not the .mil stuff, but critical stuff.
Capitalism and for profit ventures are, IMO, just peachy. But when they hurt real humans and treat them without remorse or pity (T1 :-), then that is going too far. Most layoffs are not necessary for the health of the company, and often destroy peoples’ lives. These layoffs are for the health of the stock prices and hence upper management and “investors.” And these people aren’t really investors. Once a company is profitable it doesn’t often need investments; and when it does it issues bonds. The company doesn’t profit from the sale of stock except in some imaginary way by increasing its stock price. If the stock market disappeared tomorrow, only the investors would be hurt. Not the company, as long as its sales and services were needed. Dividends are another matter entirely.
Venture capitalists are the real investors. They’re the ones who give money to help create a company. They deserve a share of the profits. The problem with the stock market is when it forces a company to hurt people only to *INCREASE* its profits. IMO, it is morally equivalent to robbing these people and their families. That’s plain wrong.
There are times when layoffs are necessary, but they are few and far between. And, by definition, it is quite often the fault of upper management who painlessly bail out with their golden parachutes.
I agree that profits are not measured in money only. The computer, for instance, was largely funded by the DoD to compute shell trajectories. Before ENIAC and friends, “computer” meant a person in a room (largely women during wartime) with pencils, paper, slide rules and tables of logarithms. The profit of the computer was the ability to defend ourselves better. This is largely the ROI on DoD funding (not counting war profiteers.) GPS is another good example, too. I’m a non-native living in the Boston area, and a GPS is essential for me to get anywhere.
The ability to place excessive profit is just totally alien to me. How anyone who destroys lives the way the directors of big corporations do and claim to be human is beyond me. Adding to your Nth $billion in profit at the expense of some loyal thirty year employee and their family isn’t the way to get into these faux xians’ heaven, and should be a tip-off as to their true nature.
E Pleb Neesta
July 16, 2008 at 5:38 pmGODISNOWHERE