How Common Is Multiple Invention?

“It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.

This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.

Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.

For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.

By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.

Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.”

― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

This one line (especially the part in parenthesis) hits directly on the heart of the matter:

    Lillienfeld likely never actually built his transistor (it would have almost certainly been impossible to build a working one due to material limitations), but he nevertheless described the concept.

There’s an interesting weird theory about how we get ideas (related to Platonic philosophy) called “morphic resonance”. Basically the theory is that ideas are actually like radio waves, in the environment, and our brains are like radio receivers that pick up ideas existing in the universe. If so, then multiple simultaneous invention makes total sense. Proponents of morphic resonance actually posit a number of other weird related coincidences and experimental evidence for their hypothesis. For example rats who master a maze in one part of the world make it easier for unrelated rats anywhere in the world to master the same maze pattern — it’s as if the learned skill/idea is “broadcast” to all rat brains. Or chemical formulations of new molecules becomes easier and faster over time, even with no change in technique.

How many inventions were invented multiple times because the first inventor ran out of money before reaching a viable product? That's a worthwhile analysis.

Edison got a workable lightbulb by having a whole staff trying different materials. The concept was known - find some resistive material that will tolerate high temperature and run some power through it. Works fine with platinum, but costs too much. Many materials can be carbonized but the filaments don't last. Swan maxed out at 14 hours. Edison's lab just kept trying materials until they got carbonized bamboo to work for 1200 hours.

It's the power of money.

From science fiction author Charles Fort in his 1931 book titled Lo! “If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root.

Vaguely related: I own a fun little board game called U.S. Patent No. 1 (made by Cheapass Games), which is obviously inspired by the story of Alexander Graham Bell beating Elisha Gray to the patent office by just a few hours. In that game, you play as one of several people throughout history who have invented a time machine, and all of you are racing to get to the U.S. Patent office first (i.e. the minute it opens), so that your time machine can hold the coveted U.S. Patent Number 1.

This has almost nothing to do with the article, of course. :-)

Before Galileo "invented" the telescope 3 dutch people tried to patent it simultaniously. One also described (like tesla) that hé reverse engineered it from writings by the ancients.

Carl Friedrich Gauss invented the FFT. Many reinvented it afterward until Cooley and Tukey popularized their reinvention of it.

Or perhaps ideas need not only be had, but also pass through more layer of filters to make it into the world proper. Ideas that were had more than once had more than one chance. Ideas that made it into the world but were only once, were lucky. So that would mean there is a bias when looking at ideas that made it. So the correlation might be due to an inversed cause and effect.

I think it is very common. In particular on the "big" ideas that are obvious to people in respective fields (making a thinking machine, a flying machine, let's turn this into a bomb etc.) where you would have multiple dispersed people somewhat competing, somewhat stealing ideas from each other.

And I also think there is quite a bit of winner writes the history / reverse history writing. Like had the Germans won World War II, German inventors would be widely credited in computing. Or the stuff on who invented the neural net brought up by the recent Nobel prize.

For folks who comment before reading, the article uses "multiple invention" as follows:

"In “How Common is Independent Discovery?,” Matt Clancy catalogues several attempts to estimate the frequency of multiple discovery, and tentatively comes up with a frequency of around 2-3% for simultaneous scientific discoveries, and perhaps an 8% chance that a given invention will be reinvented in the next decade"

I.e. they are not talking about multiple people working together on an invention, but rather parallel discoveries.

I've thought a few times when reading some funding announcement on techcrunch, "That was my idea!" which is super validating and nice to see. Some of these multiple-inventions are pretty inspiring to learn about. I think it reinforces concretely the idea that "execution" matters more than anything else.