‘Experts’ are nonsense.

Technical expertise or the creation of the most technologically-advanced discovery did not guarantee success in the marketplace, which depended on the scale of consumer demand. The typical great inventor combined ingenuity at both invention and commercial exploitation. More than 85 percent of the great inventors were directly involved in commercialization of their invention through manufacture, or both manufacture and licensing. Their enterprises incorporated the latest technology, including developments by other inventors. Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear, and Richard Hoe, were typical in their aggressive management of extensive portfolios of owned and acquired intellectual property rights. Almost half of the postbellum great inventors engaged in patent litigation, and those who were principals in firms accounted for over two thirds of all lawsuits.

Markets in patented ideas were central to ensuring that rewards were effectively calibrated to contributions. When Abraham Lincoln declared the patent system kindled the “fire of genius,” nobody supposed he meant exceptional creativity was limited to a particular class or group. The American patent system facilitated the entry of relatively disadvantaged individuals into the field of technology, enabled them to specialize in invention, mobilize resources to fund patenting and commercialize their discoveries, and enhanced the diffusion of information and inventions. Patent rights comprised secure assets that were extensively traded, and gave inventors with only modest resources the opportunity to appropriate private returns as well as to make valuable contributions to society.

If a panel of administrators had been tasked with identifying an array of inventors to elevate above their peers, the economic history of prize systems suggests they would almost certainly have failed to match the productivity and social contributions of the group that the market selected (Khan 2020). Ex ante, the population of great inventors was not especially distinctive in terms of age, education, or occupational background. Technological creativity was stimulated by higher perceived returns or demand-side incentives in general to make long-term commitments to inventive activity. Both ordinary and great inventors responded systematically to changes across time and place, and simultaneously contributed to the remarkable expansion nineteenth-century markets. In short, the experience of the great inventors highlights the democratic nature of the market for creative ideas that persists in the twenty-first century.