How early American inventors funded their ventures

I recently picked up a book that surveys major US inventions from ~1830s to WW1 (The Heroic Age of American Invention, by L. Sprague de Camp), and skimmed through the entire thing in one evening to find how each venture was funded. It’s an incomplete, informal survey, but here’s some of what I found…

Read the full post on the blog (lots of images in this one)