The toilet, the assembly line, the lightbulb, and the steam engine were all great inventions that changed the human race forever, but he inventors that we associate with each advance is usually wrong.
Thomas Crapper’s so called advance to society was the flush toilet. He did have two patents on different models of flush toilets, but he was not the first inventor. Flush toilets have been around since 3000 BC. In Skara Brae Orkney, Britain villagers realized how to divert a nearby river to allow for waste to be taken away. A closer advance to the modern toilet came around in 1206 when inventor Al-Jazari created a toilet that both refills and flushes. Crapper was a good popularizer of the toilet, and I suppose that was his fate. His name, derived from the rem crap, had meant feces since the late middle English.
Thomas Edison gets a lot of credit for things he did not do and the light bulb is no different. Edison was not the first inventor of the light bulb. He made a light bulb with a bamboo filament that was relatively inefficient, but plenty of people mad light bulbs before him. Joseph Swan was the inventor of the first commercially efficient light bulb that came out one year after Edison’s bamboo one. Edision did buy the patent later, so he got all the money for the invention.
Henry Ford was not the inventor of the assembly line. The assembly had been around forever. Ever since people realized that people become more efficient when given one singular task they have organized into lines to get things done. Ford wasn’t even the first person to apply it to cars. It was Ransom Olds who rolled the first car off the line in 1901. Ford gets the credit because he made the most inhumanly fast assembly line. At its peak, the ford plant could build a car from nothing in 93 minutes. Without robots computers or electricity, that is an amazing feat.
James Watt gets a good deal of credit for being “The founder of the steam engine”. Since antiquity the greeks understood the properties of steam and could have built engines but they had no need to take their inventions to a more practical scale. Watt did not even sell the first commercially available steam engine. Thomas Savery made a steam engine in 1650 that pumped water out of mines. Watt invented an engine in 1776 that became rather popular. In fact, his engine became the prime mover of English industry, but being a very bad business man, he did not profit to a great extent off of the specific version of the steam engine.