Not even that.
The "Benz Patent Motorwagen" was in fact not the very first car at all, like the popular tale tells.
You are right. And I am fully aware of that.
Technical history, or to be more correct: the public memory about it, is full of such mistakes. Because the real truth mostly is way more complicate, not even to be defined absolutely. Most of those stories are just simplifications, which are not quite that true when you look closer at them. (Law of physics: The closer you look, the harder it is to draw a distinct line.)
Examples:
Otto Lilienthal build the first maned gliders, while the Wright brothers built - and flew (!) - the first maned motorized airplane.
Henry Ford did not invented the car - he invented the assembly line, realized modern industry and mass production.
James Watt did not invented the steam engine - he invented control engineering. This way he build way better reliable steam engines.
Benjamin Franklin did not discover electricity. That was perhaps some of the first creatures crawled to land, struck down by a lightning. This thing with the kite was a common experiment with natural electricity back in those days. Before generators the battery was invented (
Volta is a typical example of the polymaths of that time. Very interesting guy!) Before that (in BF days) only electrostatics was the only source for electricity. Either by natural source (lightning), or by
electrostatic generators. The amount of electricity produced and stored in
Leiden jars (first Capacitors) was inpredictable. Those guys were experminenting with thousands of volts and amperes. Not a few have been killed - especially when experimenting with a kite in a thunderstorm. (The kite was mounted to the ground, and the line must not touched, as many illustrations showing Benjamin holding a kite.)
Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning discharger, became very rich with it, but above all he was one the founding fathers. But a story about a kite is better for children to remember an important person's name.
As you said, inventions, or to be more correct, the final usable product, is always a development process, based on former developments and inventions.
I don't want to stress here even more details, especially not about patent laws, particulary not the difference between the USA (the one who can prove to be the first one had the idea) and the rest of the world (the one who files the patent applications first), and why Edison became the offcial inventor of the light bulb (and other things) - which was a long process when you look at its history (that's why I used the terms as links to Wikipedia pages), started long before Nernst and Edison, so not a single inventor can be really pointed out - by several legal proceedings about patent rights, even if strictly speaking it was in fact against US patent law and in favor of the patent laws of the rest of the world, that made Edison finally the official inventor.
But
CShell and I were just yanking at each other. And when he came to me with Diego Maradona (that's where we originally started - soccer), asking (as a joke) if we germans even had TV in the 1980s, I wanted to gave some back, just over-egging the pudding.
