Who wants to be a millionaire? Failure and bankruptcy in the pursuit of innovation during the First Industrial Revolution

History often remembers the most successful inventors, but rarely those who failed. This survivorship bias toward successful inventors skews our understanding of why those inventors were so successful when others were not, potentially providing misleading interpretations concerning the incentive to innovate during periods of technical change. Our project aims to bridge this gap, by examining English bankruptcy and debtors prison records of inventors who held patents during the First Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830. By revealing the causes and extent of failure, we will be able to further our understanding of what differentiates successful and unsuccessful invention as we face the Fourth Industrial Revolution.