Edison, Bell, IBM, Morse, US Steel, Wright, Sikorsky, Westinghouse, Marconi, Dictaphone, Goodyear...there's a lot, any many of the companies are still household

Edison, Bell, IBM, Morse, US Steel, Wright, Sikorsky, Westinghouse, Marconi, Dictaphone, Goodyear...there's a lot, any many of the companies are still household names even if they don't exist anymore. How did these R&D operations get their start? The same as universities at the time: they were funded by private backers, often family, or the parent corporation of the R&D Lab (IBM Research, Bell Labs, General Electric, etc.). It's Vannevar Bush who spearheaded the creation of the federal research funding system as we know it today, for the sake of the war effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush. As a side effect, basic research is now mostly government funded, and the peer review system was created to ensure taxpayers were "getting their money's worth". A more interesting question is: why did it work then, and could it work today? My (admittedly pessimistic) view is that life-changing innovations were a lot easier (read: cheaper) to create back then. Continual breakthroughs in materials science, transportation and communications technologies left a lot of "white space" to innovate in.