When Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone on February 14th, 1876, he beat competing telephone developer Elisha Gray to the patent office by just a few hours.
I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon for a long time. Ideas seem to arrive through multiple people at once, like they’re riding a current that flows just beneath the surface of consciousness. Bell and Gray. Darwin and Wallace (they came up with a theory of evolution around the same time). Newton and Leibniz (are said to have invented calculus concurrently).
It’s as if the idea itself wants to be born, and finds any available vessel.
To me, this speaks to the concept of a collective evolutionary timeline—where innovations don’t belong to individuals so much as they emerge when the “field” is ready. We like to think of ourselves as originators, but maybe we’re more like receivers or translators tuning into a shared frequency.
I’ve seen this play out in my own design and engineering work—developing something I thought was original, only to find others were arriving at nearly the same concept, in the same window of time. At first, it was frustrating. Now I take it as confirmation that the signal is strong.
This phenomenon also shifts the way I think about competition, ownership, and timing in our industry. If the idea has chosen now, then what matters most is how fully I can embody and express my version of it. Not to be the first, but to be the clearest.
Very interesting article. The phenomenon of simultaneous invention is fascinating and historically significant. Your conclusions fit in well with Ian Morris’ conclusion that pre-industrial societies tend to invent technologies and institutions in roughly in the same order.
As a follow up it is interesting to examine what causes an invention to have impact and not just end up as a footnote. A twin study of simultaneous inventions.
Wouldn’t the numbers be significantly understated because the inventive laggards would be among the first to learn of success or patents and thus discontinue or even bury their work?
I spent 20 years studying progress when nobody else in the world seemed interested. When it became the topic du jour, I discontinued my work as I saw better minds were making progress on progress.
Yeah this is almost certainly a floor of the actual rate, as it misses people who saw someone else's work and didn't bother, and ones where there were multiple efforts just not well documented.
Just because a lot of people are working on the same idea does not mean it will be successfully invented regardless of any individual effort. The Wright Brothers were disbelieved or called frauds for the 5 years after their first flight, so other aviation pioneers kept developing as if the Wright Brothers didn't exist, and yet no one else during that time figured out what the Wright Brothers had discovered. No one else discovered the importance of banking into turns with a movable rudder, that the Smeaton coefficient was incorrect, and except for Chauviere no one else discovered that a propeller is a rotating wing. Even on that last one, Chauviere only developed his propellers for airships initially and had no intention of using them for heavier-than-air aircraft. In 1908, the best aviation pioneers in the world were still struggling to make a turn in flight that the Wright Brothers could effortlessly do in 1905.
There are many similar discoveries in history that were unnoticed, disbelieved, or forgotten about, so everyone else moved on as if they didn't exist, and yet they didn't get discovered by someone else as would be expected. They went years, sometimes decades or even centuries, before someone else successfully discovered the same thing.
There are inventions like those discussed here with broad practical impact. Also, in the doing of science, engineering, and even other projects there are often inventions where an individual produces an impactful idea that was not obvious in advance to other participants in the project. The project may be local but also might be the attempt across a world-wide community to understand a puzzle or solve a common problem. In a career of more than 40 years in science and engineering, I saw many instances where a solution was invented independently by multiple knowledgable individuals.
This often became a teaching moment, when a young person who invented such a solution found that someone else had too and immediately concluded that “their” idea had been stolen.
Your Haber Bosch example is an excellent one albeit incomplete. While Ostvald failed to create an ammonia process, he did create an ammonia to nitric acid process which is still used today. In fact, I am pretty sure Ostvald's ammonia work was because his ammonia to nitric acid invention was only marginaly useful without an ammonia source.
However, Haber Bosch was only the most economically successful of many types of nitrogen fixing technology. Birkelande Eyde, Frank Caro, nitrophosphate, Norwegian saltpeter, Chilean saltpeter are just the most prominent of the many industrially used methods to produce nitrogen fertilizers, all before Haber Bosch won out.
And even then, it was likely World War 1 and the German cutoff from Chilean nitrates that forced Haber Bosch to the fore - due to the need for nitric acid to make explosives with. The end of that war left a massive industrial infrastructure with no market except agriculture...
In this context - the driver was clearly a market need: for nitrogen fertilizers and explosives.
I personally think it is very hard to envision invention without a driver - only in those rare instances like Tesla's work, can it really be said that truly unexpected invention occurs.
A friend of mine visited the US in the summer of 1983. I proudly demonstrated my Apple II. His response: "Fantastic, but it has to be connected to a network." He was a pioneer of Container Shipping and of Information based Ports.
It's not so much the device as how the device is integrated into existing structure which it can then transform.
Could you take a look at the invention of printing in Europe and Corea? I think that multiple
inventions are typical for the period after ca 1650 and that this has to do with the rise of scientific communities, journals etc. Before that it was a one man show (Gutenberg, Da Vinci …)
Another aspect of all this is the context that drives people to invent a certain thing. A great example: in 1870, the Great Horse Flu swept the world. It was an influenza pandemic that infect horses, but not people. It did not kill many horses, but it would incapacitate them for a few weeks. There were many cases where a city's industry would be shut down for a couple of months because the horses could not drag around the city's carts. About 1/3 of Boston burned down because the horse-drawn firefighter carts were not available.
Now, think about how many people worked on "horseless carriages" in the 1870s through the 1890s. It's right there in the name!
From what I have read, Bell's target market was people who were afraid of being buried alive, and wanted to have a handset installed in their grave, inside the casket. The idea was the switchboard would be in the cryptkeeper's office, with people waking up and hollering in panic.
I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon for a long time. Ideas seem to arrive through multiple people at once, like they’re riding a current that flows just beneath the surface of consciousness. Bell and Gray. Darwin and Wallace (they came up with a theory of evolution around the same time). Newton and Leibniz (are said to have invented calculus concurrently).
It’s as if the idea itself wants to be born, and finds any available vessel.
To me, this speaks to the concept of a collective evolutionary timeline—where innovations don’t belong to individuals so much as they emerge when the “field” is ready. We like to think of ourselves as originators, but maybe we’re more like receivers or translators tuning into a shared frequency.
I’ve seen this play out in my own design and engineering work—developing something I thought was original, only to find others were arriving at nearly the same concept, in the same window of time. At first, it was frustrating. Now I take it as confirmation that the signal is strong.
This phenomenon also shifts the way I think about competition, ownership, and timing in our industry. If the idea has chosen now, then what matters most is how fully I can embody and express my version of it. Not to be the first, but to be the clearest.
Great article!
Newton and Leibniz did invent it at the same time. There was 'something in the air'. They read the same journals, had the same friends, etc..
Same for Kilby and Noyce. Deffo not true for Gray and Bell.
Very interesting article. The phenomenon of simultaneous invention is fascinating and historically significant. Your conclusions fit in well with Ian Morris’ conclusion that pre-industrial societies tend to invent technologies and institutions in roughly in the same order.
https://techratchet.com/2020/02/12/book-summary-why-the-west-rules-for-now-the-patterns-of-history-by-ian-morris/
It seems like the Technological Tree presented in strategic video games like Civilization is an accurate representation of reality.
You might enjoy this: https://www.historicaltechtree.com/
I wonder if I should add a field to the database to keep track of multiple inventions...
Great work!
As a follow up it is interesting to examine what causes an invention to have impact and not just end up as a footnote. A twin study of simultaneous inventions.
Wouldn’t the numbers be significantly understated because the inventive laggards would be among the first to learn of success or patents and thus discontinue or even bury their work?
I spent 20 years studying progress when nobody else in the world seemed interested. When it became the topic du jour, I discontinued my work as I saw better minds were making progress on progress.
Yeah this is almost certainly a floor of the actual rate, as it misses people who saw someone else's work and didn't bother, and ones where there were multiple efforts just not well documented.
Just because a lot of people are working on the same idea does not mean it will be successfully invented regardless of any individual effort. The Wright Brothers were disbelieved or called frauds for the 5 years after their first flight, so other aviation pioneers kept developing as if the Wright Brothers didn't exist, and yet no one else during that time figured out what the Wright Brothers had discovered. No one else discovered the importance of banking into turns with a movable rudder, that the Smeaton coefficient was incorrect, and except for Chauviere no one else discovered that a propeller is a rotating wing. Even on that last one, Chauviere only developed his propellers for airships initially and had no intention of using them for heavier-than-air aircraft. In 1908, the best aviation pioneers in the world were still struggling to make a turn in flight that the Wright Brothers could effortlessly do in 1905.
There are many similar discoveries in history that were unnoticed, disbelieved, or forgotten about, so everyone else moved on as if they didn't exist, and yet they didn't get discovered by someone else as would be expected. They went years, sometimes decades or even centuries, before someone else successfully discovered the same thing.
What an impressive amount of research went into this post!
There are inventions like those discussed here with broad practical impact. Also, in the doing of science, engineering, and even other projects there are often inventions where an individual produces an impactful idea that was not obvious in advance to other participants in the project. The project may be local but also might be the attempt across a world-wide community to understand a puzzle or solve a common problem. In a career of more than 40 years in science and engineering, I saw many instances where a solution was invented independently by multiple knowledgable individuals.
This often became a teaching moment, when a young person who invented such a solution found that someone else had too and immediately concluded that “their” idea had been stolen.
A very nice writeup.
Your Haber Bosch example is an excellent one albeit incomplete. While Ostvald failed to create an ammonia process, he did create an ammonia to nitric acid process which is still used today. In fact, I am pretty sure Ostvald's ammonia work was because his ammonia to nitric acid invention was only marginaly useful without an ammonia source.
However, Haber Bosch was only the most economically successful of many types of nitrogen fixing technology. Birkelande Eyde, Frank Caro, nitrophosphate, Norwegian saltpeter, Chilean saltpeter are just the most prominent of the many industrially used methods to produce nitrogen fertilizers, all before Haber Bosch won out.
And even then, it was likely World War 1 and the German cutoff from Chilean nitrates that forced Haber Bosch to the fore - due to the need for nitric acid to make explosives with. The end of that war left a massive industrial infrastructure with no market except agriculture...
In this context - the driver was clearly a market need: for nitrogen fertilizers and explosives.
I personally think it is very hard to envision invention without a driver - only in those rare instances like Tesla's work, can it really be said that truly unexpected invention occurs.
A friend of mine visited the US in the summer of 1983. I proudly demonstrated my Apple II. His response: "Fantastic, but it has to be connected to a network." He was a pioneer of Container Shipping and of Information based Ports.
It's not so much the device as how the device is integrated into existing structure which it can then transform.
Could you take a look at the invention of printing in Europe and Corea? I think that multiple
inventions are typical for the period after ca 1650 and that this has to do with the rise of scientific communities, journals etc. Before that it was a one man show (Gutenberg, Da Vinci …)
Another aspect of all this is the context that drives people to invent a certain thing. A great example: in 1870, the Great Horse Flu swept the world. It was an influenza pandemic that infect horses, but not people. It did not kill many horses, but it would incapacitate them for a few weeks. There were many cases where a city's industry would be shut down for a couple of months because the horses could not drag around the city's carts. About 1/3 of Boston burned down because the horse-drawn firefighter carts were not available.
Now, think about how many people worked on "horseless carriages" in the 1870s through the 1890s. It's right there in the name!
From what I have read, Bell's target market was people who were afraid of being buried alive, and wanted to have a handset installed in their grave, inside the casket. The idea was the switchboard would be in the cryptkeeper's office, with people waking up and hollering in panic.
Really excellent, thank you.
There is no f**king way that Gray and Bell invented the pin in acidic fluid. One nicked it off the other!
Nevertheless, fantastic work, Brian!
Nice piece of work; thanks.