Are routes like Kickstarter and Indiegogo a practical route to success for modern inventors, or not? Is it probable that a good idea will be seen and recognized on a crowd-funding site, or a long-shot? I also wonder how safe it is to put your idea out there, and possibly not get funded, but have someone else steal it. I'd love to hear your perspective on it.

Very perceptive comments. I hadn't analyzed the trends so carefully, but your words ring true.

I second what jbaker said! Thanks for the discount!

Raw food, or are we counting Prometheus as the bringer of fire?
Stone tools? Pottery? Leather?
I'm thinking pink, soft extinction...Well, maybe we'll have Twitter to follow the whole thing.

That is wonderful to hear.

My heroes are people who have achieved distinction by creating wealth for themselves and as a result for others (such as jobs). I do not consider sports, rock stars or Hollywood stars to be heroes. It would include those that inherited, and multiplied that inheritance, not those who diminished it. It includes the champions of industry who improve their companies, such as Jack Welch of GE, or Steve Jobs of Apple.
There are very few politicians who can be considered heroes. My heroes don’t have to be perfect because I have yet to meet a perfect person. One last item, heroes can also be people who change the world for the better (like Ayn Rand).

One of the (many) reasons I left Microsoft was that they are no longer interested in what engineers outside the "elite" development groups have to offer. I wasn't the first to leave and won't be the last.

Thank you very much.

Excellent read! Can't wait for the next one!

If it wasn't for inventors, open cave life would be so much more exciting and we would all live together on our flat little planet in which Gods rotate the rest of the universe around.

I believe so, yes. I know of only one tradition "basement workshop engineer-inventor" who is doing his thing on his own and doing it very well. That would be Woody Norris, who has invented everything from a personal helicopter to a radio that fits in your ear (at least 15 years ago) to stereo speakers that can only be heard if you are sitting at the focal point. Fascinating stuff.

I believe he still has a web site at woodynorris.com

Well, there was Edmond Dantes and Jean Valjean, but of course they were not the same as what is generally seen now.

+1 for excellent sarcasm

Hear hear - I sure Elizabeth Warren will be happy to have you shot for your ideas.

I've read it and loved it and looking forward to the next one. Hank was my kind of man. It's one of the few that I bought a hard copy of.

I think I read those series also.

Excellent point Jan.

You mean the characters didn't explore their feeling about being incarcerated? How it would scare them for life and that they would grow up to be alcoholics who would die in the gutter but for food stamps?

Yes enough vampires and zombies.

Love to have a review on Amazon..

the coca cola story is incredibly interesting. His son is the real story in manufacturing invention-with the bottling.

I just bought all 25 novels on Amazon for 0.99 - thanks for the tip.

Nice analysis.

Since writing my original post, I remembered another series of books that I devoured while in elementary school. They dealt with American historical figures as they "might have been" when they were young and had "familiar" names (Alexander Graham Bell was "Alec Bell").

Many were inventors or similar. I remember Alexander Graham Bell and The Wright Brothers, also George Washington Carver and "Tom Edison". There may have been one on Henry Ford also.

Most were about Annie Oakley, Jim Bridger, Davy Crockett, etc. There were a lot of them. All were presented as positive role models and heroic figures.

Off-topic a bit but does anyone remember "The Equalizer"? The show went off-track as it went on, I suspect in an attempt to compete with "The X-Files", but I always found the hero interesting. A man with a dark past who had decided to right wrongs, one person or situation at a time. Violence was a last resort. Almost always, he figured out his opponents' resources and weaknesses, then used them to bring the opponent down. A thinking person's James Bond.

For those to young to have experienced it, elementary schools used to assign biographies of people like Ford, Edison, Bell, Morse, and the like. Then as I got a bit older there were the fictional Horatio Alger stories about heroes. In my early professional career there was a Magazine called "Success" published by W. Clement Stone. Stone started at a young age selling Newspapers during the depression for $.06 apiece. He eventually started selling insurance, and built his personal fortune to over $6,000,000,000.00. Not bad for a shy boy, afraid of thunderstorms, from a broken home.

It's not just inventors no longer considered heroes, it seems to me anyone that achieves beyond the PC avg/mean is marginalized and set out as someone not to emulate.

Apparently, from a political point of view, it is better to be admired as a gangsta than the gentleman that invented air conditioning. Better to be a drug dealer than the fellow that used the secret recipe to market Coca Cola. We should tear down an older southern woman for the language she once used, instead of teaching the kids Harlan Sanders was 66 years old before he figured out KFC.

IMHO, as a Nation we have been talked into keeping our eyes on the wrong ball.

By the way I read Poj months ago and refered it to many friends. I paid full price on my Kindle, do I get a refund? HahaHa Excellant read.

Yes, Dave, I am. I think the difference between the books you describe and the books currently on the shelves accurately reflects the perspectives of the two era: now, we are felt to be willing victims (of vampires) or helplessly manipulated (by the full moon). Power is now more nearly equated with mystical power, which does not need to be understood (any more than technology is understood by most people). We are in an era of magic - not bright Tolkien magic, but Dracula magic.

I think that the ubiquity of 'magic' may also explain the return to religiosity.

Jan