List of multiple discoveries

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Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other.[1] "Sometimes", writes Merton, "the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."[2]

Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz;[3][4] the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to such famous historic instances. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.[5]

Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton"—a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together.[6]

The distinction may blur as science becomes increasingly collaborative.[7]

A distinction is drawn between a discovery and an invention, as discussed for example by Bolesław Prus.[8] However, discoveries and inventions are inextricably related, in that discoveries lead to inventions, and inventions facilitate discoveries; and since the same phenomenon of multiplicity occurs in relation to both discoveries and inventions, this article lists both multiple discoveries and multiple inventions.

3rd century BCE

Aristarchos

13th century CE

14th century

Copernicus
  • 1370: Gresham's (Copernicus') law: Nicole Oresme (c. 1370); Nicolaus Copernicus (1519);[11] Thomas Gresham (16th century); Henry Dunning Macleod (1857). Ancient references to the same concept include one in Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs (405 BCE), which compares bad politicians to bad coin (bad politicians and bad coin, respectively, drive good politicians and good coin out of circulation).[12]

16th century

Galileo
Ortelius

17th century

Newton
Leibniz

18th century

Scheele
Laplace
  • 1730: Stirling numbers – James Stirling (1730) and Masanobu Saka (1782).[29]
  • 1740s: Platinum – Antonio de Ulloa and Charles Wood (both in the 1740s).
  • 1745: Leyden Jar – Ewald Georg von Kleist (1745) and Pieter van Musschenbroek (1745–46).[30]
  • 1749: Lightning rod – Benjamin Franklin (1749) and Prokop Diviš (1754) (debated: Diviš's apparatus is assumed to have been more effective than Franklin's lightning rods in 1754, but was intended for a different purpose than lightning protection).
  • 1756: Law of conservation of matter – discovered by Mikhail Lomonosov, 1756;[31] and independently by Antoine Lavoisier, 1778.[32]
  • 1773: Oxygen – Carl Wilhelm Scheele (Uppsala, 1773), Joseph Priestley (Wiltshire, 1774). The term was coined by Antoine Lavoisier (1777). Michael Sendivogius (Polish: Michał Sędziwój; 1566–1636) is claimed as an earlier discoverer of oxygen.[33]
  • 1783: Black-hole theory – John Michell, in a 1783 paper in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, wrote: "If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun in the proportion of five hundred to one, and by supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its [mass] with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity."[34] A few years later, a similar idea was suggested independently by Pierre-Simon Laplace.[35]
  • 1798: Malthusian catastrophe – Thomas Robert Malthus (1798), Hong Liangji (1793).[36]
  • A method for measuring the specific heat of a solid – devised independently by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford; and by Johan Wilcke, who published his discovery first (apparently not later than 1796, when he died).
  • 1799: Complex plane – Geometrical representation of complex numbers was discovered independently by Caspar Wessel (1799), Jean-Robert Argand (1806), John Warren (1828), and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1831).[37]

19th century

Gauss
Faraday
Darwin
Mendeleyev
Bell
Ramón y Cajal
Cybulski
Becquerel
  • 1805: In a treatise[38] written in 1805 and published in 1866, Carl Friedrich Gauss describes an efficient algorithm to compute the discrete Fourier transform. James W. Cooley and John W. Tukey reinvented a similar algorithm in 1965.[39]
  • 1817: Cadmium – Friedrich Strohmeyer, K.S.L Hermann (both in 1817).
  • 1817: Grotthuss–Draper law (aka the Principle of Photochemical Activation) – first proposed in 1817 by Theodor Grotthuss, then independently, in 1842, by John William Draper. The law states that only that light which is absorbed by a system can bring about a photochemical change.
  • 1825: Bromine discovered by Carl Jacob Löwig; and independently, in 1826, by Antoine Jérôme Balard.
  • 1828: Beryllium – Friedrich Wöhler, A.A.B. Bussy (1828).
  • 1830: Non-Euclidean geometry (hyperbolic geometry) – Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1830), János Bolyai (1832); preceded by Gauss (unpublished result) c. 1805.
  • 1831: Electromagnetic induction was discovered by Michael Faraday in England in 1831, and independently about the same time by Joseph Henry in the U.S.[40]
  • 1831: Chloroform – Samuel Guthrie in the United States (July 1831), and a few months later Eugène Soubeiran (France) and Justus von Liebig (Germany), all of them using variations of the haloform reaction.
  • Dandelin–Gräffe method, aka Lobachevsky method – an algorithm for finding multiple roots of a polynomial, developed independently by Germinal Pierre Dandelin, Karl Heinrich Gräffe, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky.
  • 1837: Electrical telegraph – Charles Wheatstone (England, 1837), Samuel F.B. Morse (United States, 1837).
  • First law of thermodynamics – In the late 19th century, various scientists independently stated that energy and matter are persistent, although this was later to be disregarded under subatomic conditions. Hess's law (Germain Hess), Julius Robert von Mayer, and James Joule were some of the first.
  • 1846: Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, studying Uranus's orbit, independently proved that another, farther planet must exist. Neptune was found at the predicted moment and position.[41][lower-alpha 1]
  • 1851: Bessemer Process – The process of removing impurities from steel on an industrial level using oxidation, developed in 1851 by American William Kelly and independently developed and patented in 1855 by eponymous Englishman Sir Henry Bessemer.
  • 1858: The Möbius strip was discovered independently by the German astronomer–mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius and the German mathematician Johann Benedict Listing in 1858.
  • 1858: Theory of evolution by natural selection – Charles Darwin (discovery about 1840), Alfred Russel Wallace (discovery about 1857–58) – papers published concurrently, 1858.
  • 1862: 109P/Swift–Tuttle, the comet generating the Perseid meteor shower, was independently discovered by Lewis Swift on 16 July 1862, and by Horace Parnell Tuttle on 19 July 1862. The comet made a return appearance in 1992, when it was rediscovered by Japanese astronomer Tsuruhiko Kiuchi.
  • 1868: French astronomer Pierre Janssen and English astronomer Norman Lockyer independently discovered evidence in the solar spectrum for a new element that Lockyer named "helium".[42] (The formal discovery of the element was made in 1895 by two Swedish chemists, Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langlet, who found helium emanating from the uranium ore cleveite.)
  • 1869: Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev published his periodic table of chemical elements, and the following year (1870) Julius Lothar Meyer published his independently constructed version.
  • 1873: Bolesław Prus propounded a "law of combination" describing the making of discoveries and inventions: "Any new discovery or invention is a combination of earlier discoveries and inventions, or rests on them."[43]
  • 1876: Oskar Hertwig and Hermann Fol independently described the entry of sperm into the egg and the subsequent fusion of the egg and sperm nuclei to form a single new nucleus.
  • 1876: Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell independently, on the same day, filed patents for invention of the telephone.
  • 1877: Charles Cros described the principles of the phonograph that was, independently, constructed the following year (1878) by Thomas Edison.
  • 1877: In England, Edward Sharpey-Schafer reported to the Royal Society his discovery of what eventually came to be called the nerve synapse; the Royal Society was skeptical of the unconventional notion of such spaces separating individual neurons, and asked him to withdraw his report. In 1888, in Spain, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, having used the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi's technique for staining nerve cells, published his discovery of the nerve synapse, which in 1889 finally gained acceptance and won Ramón y Cajal recognition as an, alongside Golgi – many say, the – "founder of modern neuroscience".[44]
  • 1879: British physicist-chemist Joseph Swan independently developed an incandescent light bulb at the same time as American inventor Thomas Edison was independently working on his incandescent light bulb.[45] Swan's first successful electric light bulb and Edison's electric light bulb were both patented in 1879.[46]
  • Circa 1880: the integraph was invented independently by the British physicist Sir Charles Vernon Boys and by the Polish mathematician, inventor, and electrical engineer Bruno Abakanowicz. Abakanowicz's design was produced by the Swiss firm Coradi of Zurich.
  • 1886: The Hall–Héroult process for inexpensively producing aluminum was independently discovered by the American engineer-inventor Charles Martin Hall and the French scientist Paul Héroult.[47]
  • In 1895 the Russian linguist Filipp Fortunatov, and in 1896 the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, independently formulated the sound law now known as the Fortunatov–de Saussure law.[48][49]
  • 1895: Adrenaline was discovered by the Polish physiologist Napoleon Cybulski.[50] It was independently discovered in 1900 by the Japanese chemist Jōkichi Takamine and his assistant Keizo Uenaka.[51][52]
  • 1896: Two proofs of the prime number theorem (the asymptotic law of the distribution of prime numbers) were obtained independently by Jacques Hadamard and Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and appeared the same year.
  • 1896: Radioactivity was discovered independently by Henri Becquerel and Silvanus Thompson.[53]
  • 1898: Thorium radioactivity was discovered independently by Gerhard Carl Schmidt and Marie Curie.[54]
  • Vector calculus was invented independently by the American, Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903), and by the Englishman, Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925).

20th century

Nettie Stevens
Smoluchowski
Tykociński-Tykociner
Einstein
Alexander Friedmann
Hsien Wu
Szilárd
Koprowski
Purcell
Nambu
Higgs
Schwinger
Vine
Penzias
Schally
Baltimore
Alvarez
Barré-Sinoussi
Immerman
Cocks
Wilczek
Ting
Cech
Perlmutter, Riess, Schmidt


21st century

McDonald, Kajita
Allison
Honjo
Maynard
Genzel
Ghez
Doudna
Charpentier
Šikšnys
Julius
Patapoutian

Quotations

"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring."

— Farkas Bolyai to his son János Bolyai, urging him to claim the invention of non-Euclidean geometry without delay,
quoted in Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi, An introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, 1st ed., 1993, p. 83.

"[Y]ou do not [make a discovery] until a background knowledge is built up to a place where it's almost impossible not to see the new thing, and it often happens that the new step is done contemporaneously in two different places in the world, independently."

— a physicist Nobel laureate interviewed by Harriet Zuckerman, in Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, 1977, p. 204.

"[A] man can no more be completely original ... than a tree can grow out of air."

— George Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara (1905).

I never had an idea in my life. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment – I took them out. I've created nothing. Nobody does. There's no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside.

See also

Notes

  1. Priyamvada Natarajan notes that, while Le Verrier and Adams "shared credit for the discovery [of Neptune] until fairly recently ... historians of science [have] revealed that while Adams did perform some interesting calculations, his were not as precise or as accurate as Le Verrier's, and, moreover, he had not published his work, while Le Verrier had shared his predictions." Le Verrier "presented the calculated position of th[e] unseen planet [Neptune] to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris on August 31, 1846, barely two days before Adams mailed his own solution to the astronomer royal, George Airy, at the Greenwich Observatory so that his calculations could be checked. Neither Adams nor Le Verrier knew that the other had been researching Uranus's orbit." Natarajan also notes that, "Though Neptune wasn't properly identified until 1846, it had been observed much earlier.": by Galileo Galilei (1612, 1613); by Michel Lalande (8 and 10 May 1795), nephew and pupil of French astronomer Joseph-Jérôme Lalande; by Scottish astronomer John Lambert, while working at the Munich Observatory in 1845 and 1846; and by James Challis (4 and 12 August 1846).[41]

References

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  2. Merton, Robert K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press. p. 371. ISBN 978-0-226-52092-6. https://books.google.com/books?id=zPvcHuUMEMwC&q=merton+%22The+Sociology+of+Science%22&pg=PA371. 
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