Did you know that when Robert Goddard was in college he blew up the Physics Lab with one of his rocket motor experiments? Did you know that von Braun credited Goddard with helping in the development of the V-2 because Goddard was unrecognized in the US but feervently read by the German Rocket Society.
Hiram Maxim, who invented one of the first machine guns, couldn't get the US armed forces to even talk to him. Te result was we faced 180,000 German Maxim guns with bolt rifles and pistols in 1918