[ExI] book and inventions

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Tue Feb 5 18:12:46 UTC 2019


"They All Laughed"  Ira Flatow

History of a few major inventions.  I learned something every page.  One
thing I learned was the inventors were by no means marketers.  The inventor
of the first video game saw his invention used by hundreds of people and
more waiting in line to play the game, which was even simpler than Pong.
He saw no use for it and did not get a patent (and was a government worker
who could not make royalties).

One of the several inventors of the telephone thought of it as a toy and
did not realize that most people would want one.

Now some of these people may be thought by many to be geniuses.  Clearly
they had little idea of what the average person might think.

How can this be?  Some people would call it absentmindedness.  Some would
call it lack of common sense.  Maybe the inventors just spent their mental
hours thinking of the technology and had no use for the practical side of
things and did not think a lot about practical use.

Coincidence?  Lack of marketing skills and presence of high level
creativity?  How can anyone think that no one would want to talk to another
person over
a line?  This is just stunning to me.

bill w
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20190205/512c3c78/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list