Discovery and invention controversies

Robert William Kearns (March 10, 1927 – February 9, 2005) was an American mechanical engineer, educator and inventor who invented the most common intermittent windshield wiper systems used on most automobiles from 1969 to the present. His first patent for the invention was filed on December 1, 1964, after a few previous designs by other inventors had failed to gain any traction in manufacturing.
Kearns won one of the best known patent infringement cases against Ford Motor Company (1978–1990) and a case against Chrysler Corporation (1982–1992). Having invented and patented the intermittent windshield wiper mechanism, which was useful in light rain or mist, he tried to interest the "Big Three" auto makers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) in licensing the technology. Each rejected his proposal, yet began to install electronic intermittent wipers based on Kearns's design in their cars, beginning in 1969, when Ford rolled out the feature to its Mercury line.
Kearns's legal battle against Ford to protect his invention and patent was the subject of a 1993 article in The New Yorker magazine, which became the basis for a full-length biographical feature film titled Flash of Genius in 2008. Kearns was played by actor Greg Kinnear. Kearns had six children with his wife Phyllis, although they separated, supposedly as a result of the stress from the legal battle. He died of brain cancer at the age of 77.

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci ( may-OO-chee, Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo meˈuttʃi]; 13 April 1808 – 18 October 1889) was an Italian inventor and an associate of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major political figure in the history of Italy. Meucci is best known for developing a voice-communication apparatus that several sources credit as the first telephone.Meucci set up a form of voice-communication link in his Staten Island, New York, home that connected the second-floor bedroom to his laboratory. He submitted a patent caveat for his telephonic device to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound in his caveat. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound by undulatory electric current. Despite the longstanding general crediting of Bell with the accomplishment, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities supported celebrations of Meucci's 200th birthday in 2008 using the title "Inventore del telefono" (Inventor of the telephone). The U.S. House of Representatives in a resolution in 2002 also acknowledged Meucci's work in the invention of the telephone, although the U.S. Senate did not join the resolution and the interpretation of the resolution is disputed.

Jacques Benveniste (French: [ʒɑk bɛ̃venist]; 12 March 1935 – 3 October 2004) was a French immunologist born in Paris. In 1979, he published a well-known paper on the structure of platelet-activating factor and its relationship with histamine. He was head of allergy and inflammation immunology at the French biomedical research agency INSERM.
In 1988, Benveniste and colleagues published a paper in Nature describing the action of very high dilutions of anti-IgE antibody on the degranulation of human basophils, findings that seemed to support the concept of homeopathy. After the article was published, a follow-up investigation was set up by a team including John Maddox, James Randi and Walter Stewart. With the cooperation of Benveniste's own team, the group failed to replicate the original results, and subsequent investigations did not support Benveniste's findings. Benveniste refused to retract, damaging his reputation and forcing him to fund research himself, as external sources of funding were withdrawn. In 1997, he founded the company DigiBio to "develop and commercialise applications of Digital Biology." Benveniste died in 2004 in Paris following heart surgery.

Gustave Albin Whitehead (born Gustav Albin Weisskopf; 1 January 1874 – 10 October 1927) was an aviation pioneer who emigrated from Germany to the United States where he designed and built gliders, flying machines, and engines between 1897 and 1915. Controversy surrounds published accounts and Whitehead's own claims that he flew a powered machine successfully several times in 1901 and 1902, predating the first flights by the Wright Brothers in 1903.
Much of Whitehead's reputation rests on a newspaper article which was written as an eyewitness report and describes his powered and sustained flight in Connecticut on 14 August 1901. Over a hundred newspapers in the U.S. and around the world soon repeated information from the article. Several local newspapers also reported on other flight experiments that Whitehead made in 1901 and subsequent years. Whitehead's aircraft designs and experiments were described or mentioned in Scientific American articles and a 1904 book about industrial progress. His public profile faded after about 1915, however, and he died in relative obscurity in 1927.
In the 1930s, a magazine article and book asserted that Whitehead had made powered flights in 1901–02, and the book includes statements from people who said that they had seen various Whitehead flights decades earlier. These published accounts triggered debate among scholars, researchers, and aviation enthusiasts. Mainstream historians have consistently dismissed the Whitehead flight claims, which Orville Wright later described as 'mythical'.
Researchers have studied and attempted to copy Whitehead aircraft. Since the 1980s, enthusiasts in the U.S. and Germany have built and flown replicas of Whitehead's "Number 21" machine using modern engines and modern propellers, and with fundamental changes to the aircraft structure and control systems.

Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (28 August 1841 – disappeared 16 September 1890, declared dead 16 September 1897) was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion-picture camera, and director of Roundhay Garden Scene. He was possibly the first person to shoot a moving picture sequence using a single lens camera and a strip of (paper) film. He has been credited as the "Father of Cinematography", but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing largely to the events surrounding his 1890 disappearance.A Frenchman who also worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, Le Prince's motion-picture experiments culminated in 1888 in Leeds, England. In October of that year, he filmed moving-picture sequences of family members in Roundhay Garden and his son playing the accordion, using his single-lens camera and Eastman's paper negative film. At some point in the following eighteen months he also made a film of Leeds Bridge. This work may have been slightly in advance of the inventions of contemporaneous moving-picture pioneers, such as the British inventors William Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and was years in advance of that of Auguste and Louis Lumière and William Kennedy Dickson (who did the moving image work for Thomas Edison).
Le Prince was never able to perform a planned public demonstration of his camera in the US because he mysteriously vanished; he was last known to be boarding a train on 16 September 1890. Multiple conspiracy theories have emerged about the reason for his disappearance, including: a murder set up by Edison, secret homosexuality, disappearance in order to start a new life, suicide because of heavy debts and failing experiments, and a murder by his brother over their mother's will. No conclusive evidence exists for any of these theories. In 2004, a police archive in Paris was found to contain a photograph of a drowned man bearing a strong resemblance to Le Prince who was discovered in the Seine just after the time of his disappearance, but it has been claimed that the body was too short to be Le Prince.In early 1890, Edison workers had begun experimenting with using a strip of celluloid film to capture moving images. The first public results of these experiments were shown in May 1891. However, Le Prince's widow and son Adolphe were keen to advance Louis's cause as the inventor of cinematography. In 1898, Adolphe appeared as a witness for the defence in a court case brought by Edison against the American Mutoscope Company. This suit claimed that Edison was the first and sole inventor of cinematography, and thus entitled to royalties for the use of the process. Adolphe was involved in the case but was not allowed to present his father's two cameras as evidence, although films shot with cameras built according to his father's patent were presented. Eventually the court ruled in favour of Edison. A year later that ruling was overturned, but Edison then reissued his patents and succeeded in controlling the US film industry for many years.