My reason for asking is not to appraise Rand as a novelist. I ask the question because I'm trying to understand what I read. I realized early in the book that the story is not very realistic, and that the author's intention is to tell a story of great individuals, so it makes sense that she uses the individual inventor as opposed to a team. But the fact that the protagonists assume that the motor was invented by a single man struck me as implying that such a revolutionary invention would only be likely to come from the mind of a single genius. Or maybe I'm reading too much into a triviality. Also, it's not that I don't like fiction, it's just that I hadn't had any exposure to it prior to reading Atlas. One has to start somewhere. I'm really loving the novel, for what it's worth (only on page 423).