The Wright Brothers Didn't Invent the Airplane...and 9 Other ...

The Wright brothers did not invent the airplane
The story: In March of 1902, the New Zealand farmer took flight for roughly 350 yards (by most eyewitness accounts) in a monoplane aircraft before crashing into a hedge. This little-known experiment took place months before the Wright brothers more sustained flight.
Microsoft did not create the computer desktop and GUI
Leif K-Brooks
Alleged Inventor: Microsoft
Actual Inventor: Xerox PARC
The story: The computer desktop and its graphical user interface -- which lets people interact with their computer as they would the physical world, with buttons and windows -- is typically attributed to Microsoft, but the distinction should go the Xerox company.
The Xerox Alto was released and sold to the public in 1973, though the GUI wouldn't become economically viable until Apple's Lisa and Macintosh machines of the 1980s.
Henry Ford did not invent the first automobile
The story: When most people think of the automobile, they think of Henry Ford and his assembly lines. In fact, it was a German contemporary, Karl Benz, who was awarded the first patent for an automobile fueled by gas in 1886.
Benz's "motorwagon", first designed in 1885, went on sale to the general public a few years later. He built 25 models in the first 5 years, and his wife is credited with making the first road trip.
Edison did not invent X-ray photography
izismile.com
Alleged Inventor: Thomas Edison
Actual Inventor: Wilhelm Röntgen
The story: Thomas Edison is credited with many discoveries, but this should not be one of them. Instead, German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen was first, and to this day X-rays are called "Röntgen rays" in his native language.
The effects of X-radiation had been observed before, but Wilhelm Röntgen was the first to systemically study them, writing the paper "On a New Kind of Rays" in 1885. He called them "X" rays because at the time it was an unknown type of radiation.
Thomas Edison did not invent moving pictures
The story: Once again, Edison grabs credit where none is due. But Frenchman Louis Le Prince was the first to shoot moving pictures on paper film. In Leeds, England in 1888, he used a single lens camera to shoot 16 pictures a second, without blurring the exposure.
Conspiracy factor: Prince boarded a train bound for Dijon in 1890 and disappeared, never to be seen again. Years later, during a patent trial for Edison's "invention" of the moving picture, Prince's son was found shot dead in New York. American courts would later dismiss all of Prince's work.
The telescope was not invented by Galileo
The story: There are many claims for creator of the telescope, including famed astronomer Galileo, but most can agree that German-Dutch lens maker Hans Lippershey was the first to record its design.
In 1608, Lippersheyn -- inspired by his children -- put together a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece, which Galileo would use to great effect the following year.
Edison was not the first to record audio
AP
Alleged inventor: Thomas Edison
Actual Inventor: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville
The story: While Edison may have invented the phonograph, with its ability to play back recordings, it was the invention of the phonautograph in 1857 that gave us the first machine to record audio.
Scott de Martinville's recording was recently unearthed and modern technology was used to play it back, revealing the first audio recording to be: a singer, most likely the inventor himself, performing a snippet of the song "Au clair de la lune."
Edison also did not invent the light bulb
Alleged inventor: Thomas Edison
Actual Inventor: Sir Humphry Davy
The story: Yet again, Edison receives the nod here over the real inventor, Sir Humphry Davy. In the early 1800s, well before Edison's time, Davy invented the first electric light by hooking up a powerful battery to a piece of carbon, which lit up and became the earliest incarnation of what we use today.
Edison's bulbs were better equipped and became more well known, but his version wasn't released until 1877.
Marconi never invented the radio
The story: There's plenty of controversy when it comes to the invention of radio -- no doubt because there were many advances and changes in wireless technology over the years -- but Tesla should be recognized for patenting his original version of the radio.
In 1897, Tesla filed for and was granted the first radio patent, which became the basis for much of his future work, including radio-controlled boats, torpedoes, and radio frequency feedback. His work with radio dated back beyond Marconi's announcement of radio technology as his "invention."
Al Gore did not invent the internet
The story: Though the former vice president was one of the wallets behind the emergence of the world wide web, it was Vinton Cerf and his team who should be given the credit.
Cerf, known as "the father of the internet," helped create the ARPANET system, a 1970s precursor of the internet. TCP/IP was also co-designed by Cerf. Without Cerf, it's hard to imagine that the complex series of systems that we know today as the internet would have been brought together.