Some of the most important inventors you may not have heard of, are: Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Herman Hollerith, Semyon Korsakov, Alan Turing; where to start? The truth is; Hollerith was the only one that succeeded financially. How do I define this? Well, several of these people were born into privilege or married into or inherited significant wealth; and their inventiveness did not expand their wealth significantly. So, the definition of success is: that they grew their own wealth within their inventions.
Yet, being an “inventor” of something was not always that lucrative. Maybe the best example of this is Nikola Tesla. He came to America with a reported four cents in his pocket. He should have become the richest person in the world (based on the value of his patents regarding Alternating Current electricity). Yet, he died bankrupt living in a Hotel room in New York (the room and his food was paid for by George Westinghouse. Although, Thomas Edison still owed him around $90,000 or more; equivalent to about $1.5 million today).
Today, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are notoriously some of the largest corporations in the world. Elon Musk is notoriously one of the wealthiest people in the world
— source medium.com/@danielcarpenter_37975 | D. J. Adams | Apr 7, 2022