Alexander Graham Bell was an amazingly talented person. He invented the multiple telegraph, the audiometer--which is used to test your hearing--the tricycle landing gear you find on planes, and a host of other less well-known machines.

In addition to this, he was the co-founder of the prestigious magazine Science, served as President of the National Geographic Society, and spent his life working with deaf people.

But the most famous of all his creations was, of course, the telephone. It also made his family and his descendants enormously wealthy. But he almost lost it all. You see, Bell never seemed to get around to submitting a patent application. Finally, his father-in-law, who had financed a lot of the research, got so impatient that he filed the patent on Bell’s behalf on the 14th of…