simultaneous invention list

- contemporaneous invention

- simultaneous invention

- zeitgeist

- alexander graham bell and Elisha Gray both invented the telephone ("In the Air" by Malcolm Gladwell)

- "As for the telephone, it was actually invented by Meucci as far back as

1857. The various later claimants must have been influenced by the article Meucci had published in the leading American scientific magazine of the time." (- "Duplicate Inventions" by Tertius Chandler)

- more from the New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell article:

- Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus.

- Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution.

- Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions.

- Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. "In The Engines of Our Ingenuity, John Lienhard writes, “That riddle dogs all of

science. Equally futile arguments rage over who discovered oxygen. Was it Priestley who first isolated it? Lavoisier, who recognized it as a new substance but failed

to identify what the substance was, or Scheele, who got it right before either Priestley or Lavoisier but didn’t publish until after they had?”" (Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, p. 73)

- Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France.

- Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

- “There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,” Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:

- The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842.

- There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer

- and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope.

- Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries.

- The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.
- Jason Bardi, The Calculus Wars

- Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler both independently produced the world's first gasoline-powered automobile in Germany in 1885/1886. Austrians claim Siegfried Marcus in 1864. A Frenchman invented the first steam-driven car in 1769(from about.com)

- early versions of the bicycle: J.N. Niepce in Paris in 1816 and Karl von Drais in Mannheim in 1817 (from about.com)

- radar

- television: "More recently, the invention of television involved a five-way

overlap of creative effort more complex than the Newton/Leibniz

debate. Paul Nipkow was the first to consider sending images over

wires back in 1884, but he never made a working prototype. In

1907, A. A. Campbell-Swinton and Boris Rosing were the first to

suggest cathode ray tubes, but it wasn’t until Vladimir Zworkin

and Philo Farnsworth—working separately in the 1920s—that

true working models of television existed. The inventors worked

independently but simultaneously at the same basic goals with

trails of overlapping concepts, progressions, and business politics

too complex to follow. Like most innovations, if you crack open

the invention of television in search of singular answers, you find

more questions (which we’ll explore later in this chapter)." (Scott Berkun,The Myths of Innovation, p. 74)

- The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun

- MRI imaging

- motion pictures

- "some believe the zeitgeist theory of innovation - that cultural forces tell the true story of innovation. How else can we explain the WEstern Resaissance, Enlightenment, and Dark Ages without lookinga t the entire environment? from this viewpoint, individuals pay a large debt to factors beyond their control." (Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, p. 73)

- carbon copy paper: Ralph Wedgwood (England), 1806; James Watt (Scotland), 1779; Turri (Italy), 1808 (Wired.com article)

- John Couch Adams (Cambridge) and Urbain Le Verrier (Paris) both discovered the planet Neptune in 1845 (wikipedia article on it). Bouvard had told scientists in 1821 where to look in the solar system.

- "Duplicate Inventions" by Tertius Chandler

- Mendelson's Law: In 1900, however, his work was "re-discovered" by three European scientists,Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak. The exact nature of the "re-discovery" has been somewhat debated: De Vries published first on the subject, mentioning Mendel in a footnote, while Correns pointed out Mendel's priority after having read De Vries's paper and realizing that he himself did not have priority. De Vries may not have acknowledged truthfully how much of his knowledge of the laws came from his own work, or came only after reading Mendel's paper. Later scholars have accused Von Tschermak of not truly understanding the results at all. (wikipedia)

- James Burke, Connections

- and his BBC series from the 70s (which seems kind of silly now) are all on youtube (how nice!)

- the telescope: three Dutchmen in 1608, Della Porta (Italy) in 1580. (wiki)

- Logarithms: Napier in 1614 and Burgi in 1620

- "Photography is one of the few genuine cases of simultaneous invention. It

is really quite remarkable: Niepce and Daguerre were inspired by lithography

(invented by Senefelder in 1796), and their rival Talbot was set off by some-

thing quite different-Wollaston’s temporary-image star - camera (1802).

Again, photo negatives were separately invented by Reade in 1839 and Talbot

in 1840. Yet one should add that the pin-hole camera effect goes back to

Alhazen (d. 1039) and simple photochemistry to J. H. Schulze in 1727." (- "Duplicate Inventions" by Tertius Chandler)

- "Cailletet and PIctet both liquefied oxygen in 1877. They worked only 150 miles apart, yet claimed ignorance of each other." (- "Duplicate Inventions" by Tertius Chandler)

- the invention of zero?