It's a good thing that most inventors don't fall for the "something vaguely like this has been tried with inferior technology before, and it sucked" line of reasoning, or our world would look very different :)
Well, if you're a inventor, you look at the prior art to see if it's been done before. I hold six issued patents, two of which were very profitable. I had one patent rejected because I missed relevant prior art from 1948.
Then again, I feel like I know industrial designers who play with building on ideas that came before, reexamining whether those ideas might have a fresh form and a place in the world today.
Who iterate and hone until they have something worth existing in today’s world—often doing do more publicly than corporations’ R&D departments—then let the patent technicalities be the well-paid lawyers’ problem…
Who iterate and hone until they have something worth existing in today’s world—often doing do more publicly than corporations’ R&D departments—then let the patent technicalities be the well-paid lawyers’ problem…
Nothing truly new under the sun