What is a celebrated invention/discovery attributed to a single person but, had they not done it at the time, it is likely that someone else would have done it anyway not long after?
Bonus question: What is an invention that was really important and there is no telling how long we would have to wait for it to appear had it not been discovered by the one credited with it?
20 replies
Can’t you say that about all inventions?
For the thread:
The Wright Brothers were the first to fly but there were numerous teams working on doing that.
Ford generally gets the credit for assembly line production for cars. Ford “invented” the moving production line for cars, while it was actually Olsom Olds who “invented” the assembly line for cars. All of this was during the Industrial Revolution. The first true assembly line was a. Ship outfitting process that was done in the 12th century.
Bell is credited for the invention of the Telephone, He certainly is the one who patented it.
Jmm Acktually... Santos Dumont fly first. What the Wright brothers did was inventing Angry Birds.
That should be Ransom E. Olds, not Olsom Olds
Literally everything
I think time is an important variable, I should have stressed it more in the question. Sure, we would eventually get to the same ideas, but how long would it take? I suspect some development are somewhat expected as multiple people are simultaneously looking at the same underlying problem, while others come as a little more surprising.
Maybe you know it but iron was known in Center Africa before than in Europe or Middle East... but they didn't know bronze at that time.
Time and "order" are very unimportant with discoveries.
Im pretty sure historians would disagree with this statement.
What I mean is that there's no "correct order" in discoveries except if one is needed for the other. Horse riding and the wheel are not linked.
I think this applies to everything. The "geniuses" we praise (Einstein, Newton, Galileo) are not superhumans with access to secret knowledge that only their mind could unlock, they are just very clever and astute individual that studied a lot and figured out things by applying a mix of logic and intuition to information that everybody already had.
If they didn't exist, someone else would have (likely) eventually come to the same conclusions. Heck maybe someone did years earlier but never told anybody.
"If I've seen farther is because I am in the shoulders of giants"
It's called Multiple discovery. And there's really no need for collective conciousness. People working with the same information will simply figure out the same solutions to the eqations.
Kinda reminds me of the 100 monkey theory
Calculus methods was independently discovered by Leibnitz and Newton at around the same time, that's why we have different notations for the same thing.
The history of insulin is exactly that. Although it's not attributed to a single person but a few.
I think the telephone sort of fits. It's attributed to Bell but that's mainly because he wiggled his way into a US patent before his competition. The telephone has many fathers though: Bourseul, Manzetti, Reis - just to name three. The latter is also the father of the word telephone but died before it took off. There were many engineers tinkering so if Bell hadn't taken the crown, another person would have done it.
Bonus answer: penicillin. Alexander Flemming. A lucky, accidental discovery. If mold hadn't gotten sloppily into his cultures we might all have died of the plague or something nice like that.
I have to hear about how we wouldn’t have modern rock music if it wasn’t for The Beatles.
Black Sabbath were the first on the pack but they weren't alone.
Well, I think Einstein was a genius but much of his work was built on Minkowski spacetime, so the conclusions about relativity could have been reached at some point when physicists were starting to work with it. I am in no expert position to judge this, but new developments in science do genuinely build on new insights, and Minkowski built the mathematical and theoretical platform that was evidently available to physicists like Einstein.
The wheel.
This is the opposite of celebrated, but the Uranverein program could have resulted in a German atomic bomb during WW2. Fortunately it didn't work out.