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?
The wheel.
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 developings 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.
Time and “order” are very unimportant with discoveries.
Im pretty sure historians would disagree with this statement.
exactly, a great tv series on the subject incidentally https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/
Can’t you say that about all inventions?
For the thread:
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The Wright Brothers were the first to fly but there were numerous teams working on doing that.
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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.
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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.
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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”
The thing about inventions is that, a fair amount of them will have a name tied to it who you’ve never ever heard before. But you’ll most likely believe the name that is tied to it but should be more credited with refining the invention to what it would be. And one poster clearly explained that.
There will always be someone somewhere inventing something, but there’s also opportunists out there ready to pounce, take up the invention, patent it before someone else does and run away with the credit.
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.
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.
Someone shared an article with me once that explained quite a few inventions were actually developed around the same time in different areas, sometimes across the globe. I have to get to work now so I can’t try to find it just yet, but if I remember I’ll go in search of it when I have a chance. It was an interesting read pointing to a collective consciousness/knowledge base.
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 have to hear about how we wouldn’t have modern rock music if it wasn’t for The Beatles.
Despite Chuck Berry predating them by 2 years. Elvis, Buddy Holly and several others making their crafts.
It was exactly the same case for metal music. Black Sabbath is hailed as the founders of Metal music, but there had already been seeds planted for the genre to blossom anyways before they were a thing.
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.
