Just about every innovator in history has been described as "ahead of their time." But the trick is not to be too ahead of your time. You don't want to invent the telegraph in 1816 when hardly anyone had access to electricity and railroads, telegraphy's natural partners. You want to be Charles Wheatstone or Samuel Morse twenty years later, when both Britain and the United States were more technologically developed and it was clearer that semaphore telegraphy couldn't keep pace with the economy.