Financial Times FT.com

Sparks flew

By David Bodanis

Published: May 26 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 26 2007 03:00

Find an innovator with an incentive

Innovators are rarely motivated merely by the thought of their final product. Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone transformed the world. Yet in the Boston, Massachusetts of the 1870s, he was just a young Scottish immigrant, whose mother had been deaf, and who now worked as a tutor of the deaf, keen to help them succeed in life.

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