He tried to patent the car, so Ford destroyed him

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Money for nothing—that’s the American dream. Take George Selden. Over a hundred years ago, as the automotive industry was in its infancy, George used a legal loophole to obtain a patent for the car—despite the fact that cars had been around for over a decade at that point, and he’d never built one himself.

For a few years, he and his associates enforced the patent to successfully extract royalties from the many automakers sprouting up around the turn of the 20th century, making loads of money and stifling competitive innovation that kept prices too high for anyone but the extremely wealthy. Until he tried to use the trick on a man named Henry Ford.

Henry Ford is a complicated guy, but there’s no question he’s largely responsible for the modern automotive industry as we know it today. In the early 1900s, as he was trying to get Ford Motor Company off the ground to make cheaper cars for the lower classes, Henry Ford dutifully applied for a license of Selden’s patent and prepared to pay up. To stop Ford from bringing down prices, Selden’s consortium rejected him and publicly called him out as unfit to lead a car company.

What did Ford do? He went on the warpath, challenging Selden’s hold on the patent through two separate lawsuits stretching almost a decade. And in the end, it was Ford who won. He went on to change the world, for better and worse, while Selden died broke and has been largely forgotten by history.

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i forgot who wrote this one, add their IG