The facts, fiction and rumors are somewhat cloudy when it comes to trying to determine what’s true and not true about the first electric lamps. These fabricated books titled “Wizard of Menlo”, “Patenting Newspapers and Candy” and “American Ingenuity, Patent Pending” all by Thomas Edison, could be a good read if they existed. The blueprints in the background of Woodward and Swan’s inventions, along with the advertising flyers of the time, serve as a marker of the real activity and how these inventors improved upon each other’s ideas. Competition, mergers and patent acquisitions are sometimes misinterpreted in history as innovation.
