Three Famous People Who Stole Important Inventions.

It never ceases to amaze me what scoundrels lurk amongst us waiting to seize upon some other poor soul's brilliance to claim it as their own. In fact, history is littered with a litany of dastardly deeds by ne'r do wells trying to muscle in on somebody else's hard work and success. Here I will present you with the first of three cases in the world of invention.

Who invented the Telephone? Hint, it was NOT Alexander Graham Bell!

The story goes that Meucci invented the telephone after his wife became ill with arthritis and was unable to leave her bedroom. Meuuci had his laboratory in the basement and wanted to stay in touch with his wife without running up and down stairs all day long. And so he invented the telephone.

Later on, registered his invention at the patent office, where Bell worked, and then he went to see the Western Telegraph Company and asked them to test his invention. Two years after he left his telephone with the company, they finally informed Meucci that they had lost everything. Now this is where things get really shady.

Unable to renew his patent due to not having the money to pay the patent fee, Meucci later discovered that Bell, a laboratory worker for Western Union, had received a patent for the telephone! What a coincidence!

Meucci launched a legal action against Western Union and, to add insult to injury, they responded by bringing him to trial for fraud! The sheer brass neck of it.

In 1889 Meucci died without justice being served. However, in 2002 the US House of Representatives published a resolution stating that Meucci should be recognised for his work in inventing the telephone. Of course, it was too late for Meucci, but at least at last, he won his place in the history of the invention of the telephone.

Who invented motion pictures? Hint, it was NOT Edison, nor the Lumiere brothers!

Research has shown that the man who invented the movies was in fact a certain gentleman by the name of Louis Le Prince. This polymath was born in France, settled in England, and became a naturalised American.

On the 14th of October 1888, after four years of hard work, Le Prince gathered a group of three friends and a member of his family together at his home in Leeds, United Kingdom. There Le Prince shot what is now known for certain to be the very first moving film. And I know that this film exists as I have personally been to a showing of it in the Museum of Film and Television, in Bradford near Leeds. Again, things suddenly start to get shady.

Le Prince sent his wife to America to seek a venue to show his revolutionary moving film. Meanwhile, he went to France on business with his brother in Dijon. Suddenly Le Prince disappeared, missing and presumed murdered, quite possibly for his new invention.

Several years later Edison revealed his own moving film apparatus, which was nothing like anything Edison had produced before, but which bore an uncanny resemblance to the equipment built by Le Prince! As for the story of Le Prince's disappearance…

"Like any good mystery, it features unreliable witnesses, suspicious motives, and scant evidence." Terry W. Hartle. The Christian Science Monitor.

We know that Edison could be quite scurrilous when it came to business practices, but does that mean he had Le Prince murdered in order to get his invention? Who knows?

Since the last person to see Le Prince was his brother, who owed Louis a considerable sum of money, could it have been him who murdered his brother and then sold the invention to an unsuspecting Edison, or indeed the Lumiere brothers? It's like asking who really shot JFK. We will probably never know for sure.

Who invented the flying machine? Hint, it was not Samuel P. Langley.

And so we come to the third of our three scoundrels, Charles Doolittle Walcott. Only this time, Walcott was not trying to steal credit for a new invention for himself, but rather trying to deny the real inventors of the credit they so rightly deserved, in an attempt to enable his friend Langley to get undeserved credit, quite possibly in exchange for a plum job.

I am talking about The Wright brothers and their invention of a mechanical flying machine.

To discredit the Wright brothers' application for patents to do with their invention, a certain competitor named Glen Curtis, at Walcott's behest, secretly made some major modifications to a flying machine made by a certain Samuel P. Langley, Walcott's predecessor at running the Smithsonian Institute. 

The idea was to make Langley's machine, which pre-dated the Wright brothers' machine, look like it had succeeded in flying, when in fact it had failed! Ultimately, Wallcot wanted to see his friend and predecessor honoured for inventing the first flying machine.

After flight demonstrations of the Langley machine, it was then quickly restored back to its original unflyable form before being put on display at the Smithsonian, as proof that it was Langley who had invented flying machines.

In 1942 the Smithsonian finally issued a resolution stating that it was in fact the Wright brothers who had invented the flying machine. Little wonder the Wright brothers were very secretive in their work, knowing full well what charlatans were around and about. And to think that the head of such a revered institute as the Smithsonian tried to dupe the Wright brothers out of due credit as a favour to a mate whose job he took. Talk about a stitch-up. I call it diabolically shameless.