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Inventors Who Didn’t Invent What They Are Famous for Inventing
Any schoolchild knows who came up with the telephone or the sewing machine. But conventional wisdom often has it all wrong.
By Beth DeCarbo
April 12, 2026 12:00 pm ET
Ask any historian—or child, for that matter—to name the “father of the telephone,” and most will say Alexander Graham Bell, who patented his revolutionary invention in 1876.
But long before that, in 1871, inventor Antonio Meucci received a “caveat,” a precursor to a patent, for his version of a telephone, which he called a speaking telegraph. In fact, Meucci already had a working model in his home in New York City’s Staten Island. While tinkering in his basement laboratory, he used it regularly to communicate with his invalid wife, who was confined to her bedroom upstairs.
So why is Bell widely hailed as the father of the telephone and not Meucci? The world will never know for sure, but it might have come down to just $10.
Beset by financial hardship, in part because of a devastating injury in a ferryboat accident, Meucci was unable to afford the $10 fee to renew his caveat, which as a result expired. So on March 7, 1876, Bell received U.S. Patent No. 174,465 for his invention of the telephone. And for posterity, his “Experimental Telephone” can be found at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American as an artifact of American enterprise.
Illustration of a cutaway drawing of Antonio Meucci's prototype telephone, showing the receiver and transmitter components.
Cutaway drawing of Meucci’s telephone prototype, 1870s. Mondadori/Getty Images
History books are riddled with examples of pioneering inventors, like Meucci, whose work is relegated to the footnotes. In many cases, their creations are still in use. But don’t expect to see bronze monuments memorializing these inventors. Or tour the labs where their creations were birthed. Or behold their prototypes displayed in a museum behind glass.
In truth, few inventors earn immortal fame. It takes an elusive alchemy of skill, knowledge and resources—with a dash of good luck—to introduce a groundbreaking, or even life-changing, invention to the world.
“If I’m not able to get venture capital, get it made to scale, manufacture it, market it, get it out to people, what difference does it make?” asks Eric S. Hintz, acting director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Down to the wire
In 1867, Alphonso Dabb, Lucien B. Smith and William D. Hunt applied for patents for their nascent designs of barbed-wire fencing, which was much needed at the time as pioneers set up homesteads on the Great Plains, and cattle ranchers moved giant herds to railheads.
But designing barbed wire on paper was easy compared to actually manufacturing it in the quantities necessary to enclose vast tracts of land, and none of those early designs went into full production, according to Farm Collector magazine.
A turning point came when an Illinois farmer, Joseph F. Glidden, saw a barbed-wire exhibit at the 1873 DeKalb County Fair. According to family legend, Glidden was inspired to design his own wire to keep livestock out of his wife’s garden. After some trial and error, he and a local blacksmith retrofitted a hand-cranked coffee mill so that it could efficiently twist wire into uniform barbs. The barbs were placed on a wire, and a second wire was twisted around it to hold the barbs in place.
Advertising poster for Glidden Steel Barb Fence Wire featuring a portrait of inventor Joseph Farwell Glidden and views of the manufacturing works.
An advertisement for Glidden Steel Barb Fence Wire, featuring Glidden. Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
On Nov. 24, 1874, Glidden was awarded Patent No. 157,124, which he prophetically named “The Winner.” The hand-cranked coffee mill was replaced with horse-powered machinery, and Glidden and a partner, Isaac Ellwood, formed Barb Fence Co.
So who is the father of barbed wire? Inventors like Dabb or Smith, who had an original idea? Or an inventor like Glidden, who had an economically viable idea? Even now, barbed-wire collectors debate the question.
At the Smithsonian, “we try to be a little careful about saying something is first,” Hintz says. “And often, the thing that is first isn’t necessarily the thing that has the most impact.”
By figuring out how to economically mass produce barbed wire, Glidden certainly solved a problem. As a result, Barb Fence Co. gave its founders both riches and a historical legacy. In DeKalb, Ill., today, guided tours of the Ellwood House Museum and Glidden Homestead showcase lavish Victorian-era design.
Following the thread
Much like manufacturing barbed wire, making clothes in the 1860s was a time-consuming effort, with pretty much everything people wore sewn by hand. The clothing industry also employed tens of thousands of people, from skilled tailors and dressmakers in upscale shops to widowed needlewomen working 16-hour days.
One man, Walter Hunt, was the first to figure out how to make the work less onerous. In 1833, he invented a lock-stitch sewing machine that used two threads, one passing through a loop in the other, with both threads interlocking. This was the first machine that did more than merely mimic a hand stitch, according to the National Museum of American History.
Black-and-white portrait of Walter Hunt, inventor of the safety pin and sewing machine.
Walter Hunt neglected to sew up a patent. Alamy
But Hunt didn’t patent his invention at the time, in part because his daughter owned a corset-making business in Manhattan. In fact, she declined her father’s offer of a sewing machine to speed up the work, fearing that mechanized sewing would eliminate jobs. In John Scott’s 1880 book “The Story of the Sewing Machine,” Hunt’s daughter reportedly said, “The introduction of such a machine into use would be injurious to the interests of hand-sewers.”
While Walter Hunt’s daughter dissuaded her father from obtaining a sewing-machine patent, Elias Howe Jr.’s wife inspired her husband to get one.
According to the Cambridge Historical Society, in the late 1830s, Howe was working at a shop in Boston that made mariner’s tools and scientific equipment. One day, an aspiring inventor brought in a knitting machine that he was working on, which may have planted a seed in Howe’s mind for his future creation.
In 1843, when he was in his early 20s, Howe was forced from work for a time due to a disability. To pay the family’s bills, his wife took in odd-job sewing work. While watching her sew by hand, Howe realized that a machine could speed up the process, perhaps solving the family’s financial difficulties.
Howe dedicated himself to inventing a sewing machine, a painstaking effort, even with support from a family friend. Finally on Sept. 10, 1846, Howe was awarded U.S. Patent No. 4,750 for his lock-stitch sewing machine.
Then, thinking he would have more success selling his invention overseas, Howe traveled to England. Meanwhile, competitors started selling sewing machines based on Howe’s design in America.
Howe returned to the U.S., broke and unemployed, only to discover that copycat lock-stitch sewing machines had become extremely popular. Howe sent letters to suspected patent-infringers, including Isaac Singer (who would go on to make the sewing machine wildly successful).
An 1860s advertising poster of inventor Elias Howe and his sewing machine, and the first Elias Howe Jr. sewing machine, completed in 1845.
Getty Images (2)
Eventually, Howe ended up in court in a yearslong series of cases dubbed the Sewing Machine War. In the end, he beat both Isaac Singer and Walter Hunt, among others. Singer was forced to pay him royalties for every machine sold, making Howe a millionaire. And later, in 1853, the U.S. patent office denied Hunt’s belated application for his 1830s sewing-machine invention.
Illustration of Walter Hunt's original patent for the first safety pin from April 10, 1849, showing eight different pin designs.
Walter Hunt's original patent for the first safety pin. Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
In the denial, the patent commissioner scolded Hunt for allowing “his discovery to slumber” for so long, saying he submitted an application only to “strangle” someone else’s invention, presumably Howe’s. (Hunt eventually received a patent for improvements in 1854.)
Today, a bronze statue of Howe stands in Bridgeport, Conn., where the inventor’s factory once cranked out lock-stitch sewing machines. Streets, postage stamps and at least one former school building bear his name.
As for Hunt, he continued to file patents in relative obscurity, never amassing the wealth of other Industrial Age inventors. Adding insult to injury, to settle a debt, Hunt sold the 1849 patent rights for something that could have kept his legacy alive: the modern-day safety pin.
Screwed!
Ditto for a man named John Thompson, whose invention helped keep fumbled fasteners from falling on the floor. On May 9, 1933, Thompson received the patent for the cross-shaped screw head and the hand tool used to drive it. Screws with a cross-shaped head were shown to outperform those with a slotted head because a cross-shaped driver “sticks” inside without slippage. Bonus: This helps ensure the screw will be driven in straight and not at an angle.
But inexplicably, Thompson assigned the rights to Henry F. Phillips, the managing director of Oregon Copper Co., according to the Oregon Encyclopedia. With those rights, Phillips went on to license Thompson’s design to screw manufacturers, making him rich off the royalties. So even though he’s not the inventor, Henry Phillips will forever be remembered for the Phillips-head screw and screwdriver.
Of Thompson’s fate, little is known. The encyclopedia cites a 1939 Sunday Oregonian article stating that Thompson had been an auto mechanic when he invented the screw. Beyond that, merely the date of his death remains: Sept. 4, 1940.
