Coincidences in Inventing

One of the inventions I am talking about is the telephone. If you ask anybody who invented the telephone they will tell you it was Alexander Graham Bell. There is no doubt the man put a lot of work into this invention, but he may not have been the first one to come up with the idea and to perfect it. Another man named Elisha Gray was the owner of a telegraph supply company. It is said Gray went to patent his device the same day Bell already had. There was a huge legal battle that lasted for a while over the invention of the telephone. Gray stated Bell had read his preliminary patent paperwork and copied parts of his invention and it is said Bell’s device looked a lot like grays device. Today most people believe Bell came up with the device himself, so this means both men came up with just about the same device around the same time.

If I was to ask you who came up with the formula E=mc2, odds are almost everyone would say it was Albert Einstein. Even experts have said it was Einstein when they were asked that question. Well we know Einstein was a genius and we certainly don’t want to take anything away from him, but it seems he was not the one to invent this formula and it was invented several years before he came out with it. An Italian physicist named Olinto De Pretto came out with the formula years before Einstein did. The funny part of it is he was working on something to do with aether. In the nineteenth century, it was believed aether was the medium for the propagation of light and Pretto was working on problems with this and trying to figure out a formula which would explain it.

Until the twentieth century, humans did not know the stratosphere existed. It was discovered in 1902 by two scientists working independently of each other. One was Leon Teisserence de Bort and the other one was a man named Richard Assmann. De Bort was from France and Assmann from Germany. I guess he was lucky he didn’t live in the United States with a name like that, because he certainly would have been tortured as a kid. Anyway, back to the topic, the two men used two different methods to discover the existence of the stratosphere and within three days of each other both had proved it existed.

When one hears there was a few months or a year or two between two people inventing the same thing we can’t help but think one might have had the idea from the other. This is not necessarily the case however and when this has happened in the past many people who invented things claim they had no idea someone else had invented it just a little while before they did. You can understand how this can happen today, because many different scientists all over the world may be working on the same type of project. Even scientists using different protocols and scientific methods from each other maybe making progress in certain areas bringing them all closer to a solution which could happen to more than one team or person.

World War II was a time of great innovation. In 1939 Dr. Hans von Ohain, a German, flew the first jet plane with an engine in it he had invented. In 1941 Sir Frank Whittle also flew a jet plane with an engine in it he had invented. There is no doubt Dr. von Ohain was the first to invent the jet engine, but Whittle developed his independently and the flights took place only two years apart. A jet engine is a very complicated piece of machinery and for two men to come up with this invention so close to each other is quite a coincidence. Whittle had been the first to register a patent for a jet engine and he did it in 1930 long before Ohain. I guess we would have to say if anyone got the idea from the other it would have had to have been Ohain who filed his patent five years later. Both men claim they had worked on these engines independently of the other.

One invention which was claimed by several people is the television, but it has been decided by most people including the MIT Review that Philo Farnsworth gets credit. The reason for this is this American inventor is responsible for the invention of the first fully functional all electronic image pickup device known as the “image dissector.” He also had a lot to do with contributing to the early development of an all-electric TV. The man was a genius and to prove this further he went on to invent a simple fusion device called the fuser. The device was not created to generate power, but to serve as a device for generating neutrons. A mechanical television was invented by a Scottish engineer named John Logie Baird who demonstrated his television on 26 January, 1926. He also held the first demonstration of a color television. Mechanical televisions produced a dim orange image which was about 1 ½ inches square and had forty-eight scan lines. His produced 7.5 frames per second. When you look at this thing it  looked like a record player on its side with the small end of a megaphone just above the spinning disc with the viewer looking into the large end. A television receiver was next to it.

Some of the early inventions which paralleled other inventions are just not practical even though they had the same result in mind. Some of them didn’t have the ease of use, or were just not comfortable enough and did not have all the features of the invention that became popular. For example, would you want to watch a television which had no audio? I believe we are going to see a lot more inventions produced at the same time as others which have the same purpose. Look at how many companies are working on extending our lives and are trying to do away with cancer or other diseases. It is quite possible these problems may be solved by more than one company simultaneously.