Samuel F. B. Morse didn't invent the telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone. Thomas Edison invented neither the light bulb nor the movie camera. Guglielmo Marconi most assuredly didn't invent radio. Neither Philo Farnsworth nor Vladimir Zworykin invented television. The integrated circuit's provenance remains in simmering dispute between Jack Kilby fans and Robert Noyce supporters. As for the Internet and its ubiquitous browser, let's just say that-as with these other technological "breakthroughs"-"publicity," "priority," and "patent" are often mutually exclusive.

When it comes to invention, Henry Ford-who, of course, invented neither the automobile nor the mass-production line-was right: history is indeed bunk. The wrenched context and sheer dishonesty of most sagas of "heroic" inventors and their profitable progeny brings to mind science historian Otto Neugebauer's astutely cynical observation that "The common belief that we gain historical perspective' with increasing distance seems to me to utterly misrepresent the actual situation. What we gain is merely confidence in generalization that we would never dare to make if we had access to the real wealth of contemporary evidence."

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