A common critique of Thomas Edison is that a large part of invention that gets attributed to him was the work of his employees who only got workmen's wages in return. The idea of an industrial research laboratory where employees get paid but in all other aspects get unrecognized is often attribute to have started with him.

My understanding of modern research labs is that the actual inventors put their name on the patent, but the owner of the patent may be the company.

Is that not the case? Or is the inventor usually just the project leaders?

It seems very wrong that Edison would have put himself on the patent as the inventor AND the owner of the patent.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the people named on the patent have to be the actual inventors. A lawyer explained to me that you have to be the inventor behind at least one of the claims. Of course that practice can be abused.

A way to protect your inventorship is to write down what you think you invented, and submit it in writing to your employer. I work for a F500, and we have an official process for this, with a reward. It benefits the company to get patent-able ideas documented.

Yes, you're required to accurately list all inventors or that's cause to invalidate the patent.

Check out how many patents Steve Jobs has. I suspect that he wanted to be listed as an inventor on anything that he was directly involved with, even only slightly.

Many patents are owned by the inventor(s).

Another big one in our culture is location prestige. When I was reading a lot of scientific papers I lost count of how many times top universities on the coasts got credit for things that had shown up a decade earlier in some little known paper published by someone in some smaller midwestern or southern college. I saw lots of this in theoretical biology, math, and CS.

I think it was only rarely plagiarism. Mostly it was just that stuff only gets noticed when it gets published by a prestigious university lab. They were probably honestly unaware that anyone else had ever done anything similar.

The NYT started this effort a while back:

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now, we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlook...