The internet has a patron saint of the lone inventor. It is Nikola Tesla. Memes show him as the unrecognized genius, robbed of credit by Thomas Edison.

Tesla was a real and prolific inventor. The myth around him grew after his death. The Atlantic noted that the mythology has reached exaggerated levels, casting him against Edison in a battle that involved many other people.

The Oatmeal webcomic drove the revival. Fans raised more than a million dollars for a Tesla museum.

American English has a stock figure who works best alone. He is a lone wolf. The phrase is used as praise in business and in action films.

The Oxford English Dictionary first records it in 1909, describing panhandlers who did not mix with others. Merriam-Webster defines it simply as one who prefers to work, act, or live alone.

In the 2008 film Iron Man, a billionaire is captured and held in a cave in Afghanistan. With a fellow prisoner and a box of parts, he builds a powered suit of armor and escapes.

The scene is the modern form of an old story. One mind, one problem, no help. The film even jokes about its own impossibility. The villain protests, “Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!”

Apple’s founding story centers on a garage in Los Altos, California. Tourists visit it. Steve Wozniak, who did the engineering, has a correction.

“The garage is a bit of a myth,” Wozniak told an interviewer. “We did no designs there.” The Apple I was designed in his cubicle at Hewlett-Packard and in his apartment. The garage stored parts.

In 2010 David Fincher made a film about the founding of Facebook. The Social Network shows Mark Zuckerberg coding alone at night and cutting off everyone who trusted him.

Zuckerberg was not pleased. “I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive,” he said. The film is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires. The book’s publicist once described it as “big juicy fun” rather than “reportage.”

The film won three Oscars.

In 1840 Thomas Carlyle delivered a series of lectures in London. They became the book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Its claim was simple. “Universal History… is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”

Herbert Spencer attacked the idea. Society makes the person, he argued, not the reverse. Professional historians abandoned the theory in the twentieth century. Popular biography never did.

In 1943 Ayn Rand published The Fountainhead. Its hero is an architect named Howard Roark. His designs are unconventional. He is expelled from school and fired from firms for refusing to compromise.

Rand’s stated theme was “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.” The book became a bestseller with millions of readers.

Since 1981 the MacArthur Foundation has awarded fellowships with a strange rule. You cannot apply. Nobody knows who nominated you. The news arrives as a surprise phone call.

The foundation gives 20 to 30 awards a year. The program was created, in its own words, “to foster continued innovation by removing financial impediments.”

The famous name is not the foundation’s. “Genius grant” was coined by the news media in 1981. The lone-genius label was applied by reporters.

The image of Thomas Edison is a man alone in a laboratory. The reality was a team. Edison hired “muckers,” engineers, machinists, and physicists from around the world.

The team was about 14 in the early years and 50 or 60 by the 1880s. The lab produced more than 400 patents in six years. Newspapers called Edison “the Wizard of Menlo Park.”

The muckers built the wizard deliberately. They saw that Edison alone made a more valuable brand than the group. The myth was a business decision.