The Forgotten Inventor: Hiram Maxim and the Incandescent Lightbulb
Hiram Maxim, an engineer and inventor, developed a novel filament production method that would have made him a household name had Thomas Edison not reportedly made "a clean steal" of his revolutionary technology. Maxim's bulbs outclassed Edison's, but Edison's agile self-promotion and self-proclaimed invention of the light bulb won out, obscuring the contributions of others who were essential to the technology's development. The invention of the light bulb was a decades-long process of incremental changes to create a filament that could be manufactured reliably and extended beyond Edison and Maxim alone.