Similarly, Marconi, at first, overlooked the radio’s value as a public broadcast medium, instead believing its principal application would be in the transmission of point-to-point messages, such as ship-to-ship, where communication by wire was infeasible. Moreover, we must recognize that an innovation’s full potential may be realized only after extensive improvements or after complementary innovations in other fields of science.
According to Charles Townes, a Nobel Prize winner for his work on the laser, the attorneys for Bell Labs initially, in the late 1960s, refused to patent the laser because they believed it had no applications in the field of telecommunications. Only in the 1980s, after extensive improvements in fiber optics technology, did the laser’s importance for telecommunications become apparent.