Inventors are what push us forward as a species - some of them slave for years with dogged determination, and some of them chance upon it by sheer accident - and these inventions fundamentally change the way we live our lives. In this list we tip our hats to the inventors who, for whatever reasons, never made a killing from their inventions. We use all of them to this day and our lives are all the more convenient for it.

Daisuke Inoue - Karaoke Machine

Karaoke Machines, although Daisuke is responsible for the invention he never patented it and thus never made any money.

All the fun we have when we go karaoke we owe to Daisuke Inoue and while he made no money from his invention, let's at least tip our hat to this Japanese businessman. Daisuke made money from playing drums in a backing band which let bar goers sing. One time he could not make a gig and so he put the backing music on a tape and later made 11 karaoke machines which he leased out. But the shortsighted businessman did not patent his invention and so he never made any money off it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee - The Internet

We owe this man our convenient lives, for he gave us the World Wide Web and he gave it to us for free.

We owe this article we are reading, and almost every aspect of our daily existence that has been simplified to a click of a button to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the web to help scientists working at the European research laboratory at CERN. The first website was built at CERN in 1991, and from there the internet was developed. Sir Tim did not patent his idea and to this he has attributed the success of his invention, the fact that it was made available freely.