Elias Howe could not sell his invention. In 1846, he obtained a patent for a working sewing machine, but American tailors refused to use it, and he ran low on money to produce it. Elias Howe sailed to England to find investors. Those investors never paid him in full. The legal fix that cleaned up the dispute became the first patent pool in American history. According to the Library of Congress, telecom companies still use a similar patent-pool model to license the patents used in 5G phones. Here is how a 19th-century inventor's machine ended up linked to your phone bill.
A working machine nobody wanted to buy
