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. "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."
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.
Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton"—a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together.
A distinction is drawn between a discovery and an invention, as discussed for example by Bolesław Prus. 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.
1662: Boyle's law (sometimes referred to as the "Boyle-Mariotte law") is one of the gas laws and basis of derivation for the ideal gas law, which describes the relationship between the product pressure and volume within a closed system as constant when temperature remains at a fixed measure. The law was named for chemist and physicistRobert Boyle, who published the original law in 1662. The French physicist Edme Mariotte discovered the same law independently of Boyle in 1676.
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).
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." A few years later, a similar idea was suggested independently by Pierre-Simon Laplace.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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." In 1978, Christopher Kasparek independently proposed an identical model of discovery and invention which he termed "recombinant conceptualization".
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.
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".
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. Swan's first successful electric light bulb and Edison's electric light bulb were both patented in 1879.
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.
1895: Adrenaline was discovered by the Polish physiologist Napoleon Cybulski. It was independently discovered in 1900 by the Japanese chemist Jōkichi Takamine and his assistant Keizo Uenaka.
1908: The Hardy–Weinberg principle is a principle of population genetics that states that, in the absence of other evolutionary influences, allele and genotype frequencies in a population will remain constant from generation to generation. This law was formulated in 1908 independently by German obstetrician-gynecologist Wilhelm Weinberg and, a little later and a little less rigorously, by British mathematician G.H. Hardy.
1908: The Stark–Einstein law (aka photochemical equivalence law, or photoequivalence law) – independently formulated between 1908 and 1913 by Johannes Stark and Albert Einstein. It states that every photon that is absorbed will cause a (primary) chemical or physical reaction.
1923: Georgios Papanikolaou is credited with discovering as early as 1923 that cervical cancer cells can be detected microscopically, though his invention of the Pap test went largely ignored by physicians until 1943. Aurel Babeş of Romania independently made similar discoveries in 1927.
1926: Jet stream was detected in the 1920s by Japanese meteorologistWasaburo Oishi, whose work largely went unnoticed outside Japan because he published his findings in Esperanto. Often given some credit for discovery of jet streams is American pilot Wiley Post, who in the year before his 1935 death noticed that at times his ground speed greatly exceeded his air speed. Real understanding of the nature of jet streams is often credited to experience in World War II military flights.
1926: Borůvka's algorithm, an algorithm for finding a minimum spanning tree in a graph, was first published in 1926 by Otakar Borůvka. The algorithm was rediscovered by Choquet in 1938; again by Florek, Łukasiewicz, Perkal, Steinhaus, and Zubrzycki; and again by Sollin in 1965.
1931: A theory of protein denaturation is widely attributed to Alfred Mirsky and Linus Pauling, who published their paper in 1936, though it had been independently discovered in 1931 by Hsien Wu, whom some now recognize as the originator of the theory.
1936: In computer science, the concept of the "universal computing machine" (now generally called the "Turing Machine") was proposed by Alan Turing, but also independently by Emil Post, both in 1936. Similar approaches, also aiming to cover the concept of universal computing, were introduced by S.C. Kleene, Rózsa Péter, and Alonzo Church that same year. Also in 1936, Konrad Zuse tried to build a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programability; however, Zuse's machine was never fully functional. The later Atanasoff–Berry Computer ("ABC"), designed by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, was the first fully electronicdigitalcomputing device; while not programmable, it pioneered important elements of modern computing, including binary arithmetic and electronic switching elements, though its special-purpose nature and lack of a changeable, stored program distinguish it from modern computers.
1941: In agriculture, the ability of synthetic auxins2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and MCPA to act as hormone herbicides was discovered independently by four groups in the United States and Great Britain: William G. Templeman and coworkers (1941); Philip Nutman, Gerard Thornton, and Juda Quastel (1942); Franklin Jones (1942); and Ezra Kraus, John W. Mitchell, and Charles L. Hamner (1943). All four groups were subject to various aspects of wartime secrecy, and the exact order of discovery is a matter of some debate.
1952: The maser, a precursor to the laser, was described by Russian scientists in 1952, and built independently by scientists at Columbia University in 1953. The laser itself was developed independently by Gordon Gould at Columbia University and by researchers at Bell Labs, and by the Russian scientist Aleksandr Prokhorov.
1958: The integrated circuit was devised independently by Jack Kilby in 1958 and half a year later by Robert Noyce. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.
1960s: Kolmogorov complexity, also known as "Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity", descriptive complexity, etc., of an object such as a piece of text is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object. The concept was independently introduced by Ray Solomonoff, Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin in the 1960s.
Early 1960s: The concept of packet switching, a communications method in which discrete blocks of data (packets) are routed between nodes over data links, was first explored by Paul Baran in the early 1960s, and then independently a few years later by Donald Davies.
Early 1960s: The principles of atomic layer deposition, a thin-film growth method that in the 2000s contributed to the continuation of semiconductor-device scaling in accord with Moore's law, were independently discovered in the early 1960s by the Soviet scientists Valentin Aleskovsky and Stanislav Koltsov and in 1974 by the Finnish inventor Tuomo Suntola.
Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is a popular model in finance for trading off risk versus return. Three separate authors published it in academic journals and a fourth circulated unpublished papers.
Cosmic microwave background as a signature of the Big Bang was confirmed by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs. Penzias and Wilson had been testing a very sensitive microwave detector when they noticed that their equipment was picking up a strange noise that was independent of the orientation (direction) of their instrument. At first they thought the noise was generated due to pigeon droppings in the detector, but even after they removed the droppings the noise was still detected. Meanwhile, at nearby Princeton University two physicists, Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles, were working on a suggestion of George Gamow's that the early universe had been hot and dense; they believed its hot glow could still be detected but would be so red-shifted that it would manifest as microwaves. When Penzias and Wilson learned about this, they realized that they had already detected the red-shifted microwaves and (to the disappointment of Dicke and Peebles) were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics.
1963: Conductive polymers: Between 1963 and 1977, doped and oxidized highly conductive polyacetylene derivatives were independently discovered, "lost", and then rediscovered at least four times. The last rediscovery won the 2000 Nobel prize in Chemistry, for the "discovery and development of conductive polymers". This was without reference to the previous discoveries.
1965: The Cocke–Younger–Kasami algorithm was independently discovered three times: by T. Kasami (1965), by Daniel H. Younger (1967), and by John Cocke and Jacob T. Schwartz (1970).
1967: The affine scaling method for solving linear programming was discovered by Soviet mathematician I.I. Dikin in 1967. It went unnoticed in the West for two decades, until two groups of researchers in the U.S. reinvented it in 1985.
1971: The Cook–Levin theorem (also known as "Cook's theorem"), a result in computational complexity theory, was proven independently by Stephen Cook (1971 in the U.S.) and by Leonid Levin (1973 in the USSR). Levin was not aware of Cook's achievement because of communication difficulties between East and West during the Cold War. The other way round, Levin's work was not widely known in the West until around 1978.
1973: RSA, an algorithm suitable for signing and encryption in public-key cryptography, was publicly described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. An equivalent system had been described in 1973 in an internal document by Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, but his work was not revealed until 1997 due to its top-secret classification.
1975: Endorphins were discovered independently in Scotland and the US in 1975.
1975: Two English biologists, Robin Holliday and John Pugh, and an American biologist, Arthur Riggs, independently suggested that methylation, a chemical modification of DNA that is heritable and can be induced by environmental influences, including physical and emotional stresses, has an important part in controlling gene expression. This concept has become foundational for the field of epigenetics, with its multifarious implications for physical and mental health and for sociopolitics.
1976: Mevastatin (compactin; ML-236B) was independently discovered by Akira Endo in Japan in a culture of Penicillium citrinium and by a British group in a culture of Penicillium brevicompactum. Both reports were published in 1976.
1980: Stigler's law of eponymy, stating that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer, was self-named for ironic effect by Stephen Stigler (1980), who acknowledged that this law had earlier been discovered by many others, including Henry Dudeney (1917).
1983: Two separate research groups led by American Robert Gallo and French investigators Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier independently declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting AIDS patients, and published their findings in the same issue of the journal Science. A third contemporaneous group, at the University of California, San Francisco, led by Dr. Jay Levy, in 1983 independently discovered an AIDS virus which was very different from that reported by the Montagnier and Gallo groups and which indicated, for the first time, the heterogeneity of HIV isolates.
1984: Comet Levy-Rudenko was discovered independently by David H. Levy on 13 November 1984 and the next evening by Michael Rudenko. (It was the first of 23 comets discovered by Levy, who is famous as the 1993 co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the first comet ever observed crashing into a planet, Jupiter.)
1989: Thomas R. Cech (Colorado) and Sidney Altman (Yale) won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their independent discovery in the 1980s of ribozymes – for the "discovery of catalytic properties of RNA" – using different approaches. Catalytic RNA was an unexpected finding, something they were not looking for, and it required rigorous proof that there was no contaminating protein enzyme.
1993: groups led by Donald S. Bethune at IBM and Sumio Iijima at NEC independently discovered single-wallcarbon nanotubes and methods to produce them using transition-metal catalysts.
2020: Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, who each have led a group of astronomers focused since the early 1990s on a region at the center of the Milky Way galaxy called Sagittarius A*, finding an extremely heavy, invisible object (black hole) that pulls on a jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds. Some 4 million solar masses are packed together in a region no larger than the Solar System.
"[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."
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.
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