Indeed, he commercialised but did not invent the light bulb.GE's strength is not in breakthrough inventions but, to use Mr Immelt's words, "in turning $50m ideas into billion-dollar ideas".
But for millions of Africans, life without these inventions and the innovations based on them is still their daily reality.
And I am still uneasy about the outright inventions in The Imitation Game, particularly its fantasy about Turing's supposed connection with the "fifth man" John Cairncross.
And while the NSFW warning might often have served as pragmatic advice (behind which, admittedly, were ethical norms about workplace behaviour), the later injunctions not to click have a moral force that – just possibly – suggests something counterintuitive: the spread of ethical compunction across the basest, most sexually commodifying and amoral of all human inventions, the internet.
For them, property rights are human inventions that must be justified by the sort of society they produce.
He says ministers are wrong to become so easily obsessed by new discoveries and inventions that interest them, such as graphene or driverless cars.
Biography has embraced a new style which blends the narrative inventions of fiction with the historical authority of the traditional profile.
How close we are to other sci-fi inventions we've spent decades pining for?
'People complain if we take them out.' It would be foolish to expect verse to appear in modern crackers - many Victorian delights have gone the way of the penny farthing: replaced by better modern inventions.
(I remember, incidentally, the late Christopher Hitchens's rip-roaring denunciations of the fantasy-Churchill portrayed in The King's Speech. Perhaps we need some new Hitchens to get cross about the inventions in The Imitation Game).
All the while, confident in the theoretical underpinnings of their inventions, they reassured any doubters that all this activity was not just making bankers rich.
