Behold:
Biden, of course, is wrong. Now, it is true to say that Edison did not invent the light bulb alone; numerous other inventors made important steps along the way. But Edison took prior designs, his own ideas, ideas from his team, and business sense to make practical and long-lived light bulbs, turning them from rarities to commodities that flooded the world. The black man Biden is talking about, Lewis Howard Latimer, was one of those important contributors… but a *late* one. Latimer contributed an improved carbon filament, one that burned much longer, in about 1880, getting a patent for it in 1882. But Edison demonstrated *his* bulb in 1879. Edison being Edison, he bought the rights to Latimers patent and hired him in 1884.
It’s probably fair to say that Edison invented the light bulb about as much as Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. Which is to say… *kinda,* in that he led a team of people who did the actual work. But being the CMFIC of a project, especially if you’re the MF paying for it and ramming it through, means you get the credit. Werner von Braun didn’t carve the A-4 rocket out of a block of aluminum with a spork; rather a lot of technicians at Peenemunde (and elsewhere, especially later when production ramped up inside a mountain using Socialized Labor) did that for him. And yet WvB rightly gets the credit for the V-2. In contrast, the individual techs who worked on the iPhone, A-4 and light bulb *don’t* get the credit because they weren’t the driving force.
That Latimer didn’t invent the light bulb is doubtless known to Biden, or at least to whoever told him to say that. But re-writing history is important to him for some reason. Presumably for the same reason that George Washington Carver is often credited for inventing peanut butter in 1916, when it had in fact been patented by a Canadian in 1884, and apparently the Aztecs were making it by the time Cortez and some industrious migrants showed up and culturally enriched them.
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