It would be sad if it were true. But there are too many parts of this story that make no sense and therefore make me doubt its veracity: - US patent was grant

It would be sad if it were true. But there are too many parts of this story that make no sense and therefore make me doubt its veracity: - US patent was granted in 1987 and maintenance fees must be paid 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after that i.e. first fees due in 1991; UK patent was granted in 1985 and maintenance fees must be paid 4, 5, 6, etc years after that, i.e. first payment in 1989. So why the hell does a 1988 boardroom dispute result in being unable to pay the small fees required 1 and 3 years later? - nevermind the chronology, if you have 60 million pounds worth of orders then getting a bank manager to loan you 60,000 pounds for licensing fees is a simple matter; he probably didn't actually have 60 million pounds of orders (there's no citation in the article for verifying this claim either) - whatever number of orders he did have were clearly not enough to convince banks or investors to pony up the 60k required; now, if he didn't have enough orders in 1989, when the UK maintenance fees became due, which was 3 years after the trade show in 1986, the real problem must be he didn't run his business properly, not patent maintenance fees - or maybe the 60k wasn't really the full extent of the business's financial issues; either way there's only 2 possibilities here: his product didn't deliver what it claimed to and so he couldn't raise the funding he required, or the product was fine but he ran the business poorly Reading between the lines, what's sad in this story isn't the patent system, it's the lack of business acumen required to take a product to market. Had the patent been extended it's unlikely he would have been commercially successful (other than perhaps to peddle the patent onwards, which isn't what people seem to be defining as success here) because the problem wasn't a matter of time, it was one of business strategy and execution.