TIL that philanthropist and engineer Avery Fisher was motivated to start his own company after, identifying a way to save his employer $10,000 a year, was immediately denied a $5/week raise.

[u/EtOHMartini]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avery_Fisher

[u/Justin-N-Case]

He also subtly pointed out that his boss was an idiot.

[u/acathode → u/Justin-N-Case]

Read the full quote - he's not very subtle at all about his former boss Ed Dodd being an asshole:

Fisher continued "In 1937, I noticed that the advertising department of Dodd, Mead was buying their photo engravings from one source and their book manufacturing department was buying from another. If they combined both those purchases and bought from one source, their quantity discount would save them just under $10,000 a year. I went to my superior, Ed Dodd, and told him about it. He said, "That's a great idea, Fisher." He never called me by my first name – always by my last, you know, like a deckhand. He said, "I think I'll do something about it." And they did. And I said, "By the way, I'd be very grateful if I could have a five dollar raise."

He could have said, "Well, not right now." But instead he said, "Well, no. We probably could get some young Yale boy in here to do your work for less than we're paying you." That day, I said to myself, "I've got to get out of here one way or another," and I started putting [radio-phonograph] sets together for friends. I was moonlighting, and I did that for a number of years before I was in a position to get out and really spend full time on this. By 1943, I'd built up my company, Philharmonic Radio, to the point where I could draw enough money from it to earn a living. By that time I had a wife and child.

So I owe them [Dodd, Mead] everything. Because I really loved my work as a book designer, and I turned out some very fine stuff, which won prizes. One of the books I turned out was called Grassroot Jungles, which became one of the 50 best books of the year for graphic design—this is out of 40,000 titles—and Ed Dodd never let me put my name in a book for credit as the designer. Now this is a long answer to your simple question, what got me into hi-fi. It was an act of desperation—and also of love, because I really enjoyed hearing good equipment.

[u/alphawimp731 → u/acathode]

He never called me by my first name – always by my last, you know, like a dickhead.

Did anyone else initially read it that way?

[u/dego_frank → u/alphawimp731]

No because what he actually said makes more sense.