How Common Is Multiple Invention? | Hacker News Reader

How Common Is Multiple Invention?

construction-physics.com

63 pointsrbanffy44 comments

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.

In addition to the filament material, Edison's research program also worked tirelessly on improving vacuum technology. Getting electric current into a glass bulb without leaks or cracking due to thermal expansion, and keeping the air out, are no small feats.

They started by improving vacuum pumps and getting several patents on that. This was before the invention of the getter, so the pumps had to do all the work.

Ah, the getter. Another materials problem. ;-)

Getters are fascinating. I read a bit about the type they use for the LHC...

“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.

An invention doesn't become viable when someone thinks it up, it becomes viable when the material science is there to make it happen. We all wish we had the impossible, and we ponder what we would do if physics were just a little more forgiving. So, when material science advances to the point that physics is no longer the limiting factor, a swath of tinkerers is going try it out, all at once, and a few will get it right.

I've adopted a personal rule about "invention," loosely based on the patent system. Claiming to have had an "idea" is not enough. Ideas are a dime a dozen. But a patent requires a coherent description, novelty, and practicability.

And disclosure.

Reduction to practice is where I think the rubber meets the road. This is where you find out if someone actually understands the subject matter well enough to have invented something, and at least has discovered and overcome the major pitfalls. Plus the act of making something work really helps to clarify the idea and demonstrate non-obviousness. And if it can't be reduced to practice, then it's not an invention.

There's nothing wrong with publishing an idea but leaving recognition for inventorship to someone else.

> Ideas are a dime a dozen.

This is one of those statements that say more about the person not having ideas than about ideas. One could say it was an idea in it self so poor it should have vanished in the pile of crap never to be heard about by anyone - if only they had two or three more.

History is full of accomplished people who thought everything was invented already. The truth is that we started rubbing sticks together two weeks ago. In the cosmic sense we don't even have a life span. Our average memory cant compete with a single sheet of a4 paper. It is a miracle we can find time to fit in an original thought in the cracks between earning a living, reproducing, eating, sleeping, house keeping, social interactions and personal hygiene.

And then we have this preference for keeping things the way they are. Something new, however adventurous, really has to make an effort to overcome that one! I bet 99% gets debunked by the person having the thought.

Patents are only interesting if what you are really looking for is money or fame. It's an inferior mind set compared to curiosity. You decide what counts, not the guy willing to give you a shiny dime for what could be that single awesome original thought you got to have in your life span but only after you share it. ha-ha

The stuff people discovered is actually so bizarre that if you described it to people 100 years before it would sound utterly absurd. In the future our fellow apes will descend from the trees and rub sticks together? Then the other monkey looks at you from the corner of their eyes while tilting their head. Of course before that one of them had to come up with the idea to go live in trees! Imagine what bad idea that was. Or how about crawling onto the beach and living on land. The other fish must have been like, dude?!?! stop eating the pink sea weed!

I remember "inventing" a tv watch when I was 5. Clearly that's not an invention.

On the other hand coming up with the idea of the solid state transistor in the mid 1920s is not as useless an invention as my 5 year old self's invention of the tv watch. On the contrary, it was a brilliant idea. There is no doubt a longer story about why it didn't go anywhere then, and the fact that it didn't go anywhere tends to negate the claim to "invention", but that's semantics. The idea itself was world-changing. I'm sure Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen were aware of this earlier work and would have found it inspiring because if there was any way to achieve solid state transistors... (Imagine how WWII would have gone had one of the major powers had solid state transistors.)

It was hard to build so it actually worked.

It did work, though.

One thing I recognize is that coming up with a novel and coherent theory of operation is worthy of recognition by itself. One example is that the ancient Greeks proved the theory of a parabolic mirror, even if they couldn't make one, and most people agree that it was a pretty cool achievement.

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.

I quite like this. While we experience our own thought process as unique, and see it that way in other people who come up with ideas we'd never have thought of, there is nevertheless an entire ecosystem around even the most brilliant genius.

I also think there's something about the nature of reality which suggests that if we try, we will eventually discover what is there to be discovered. As David Deutsch puts it, "everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge". Of course the "invention" is about discovering the right knowledge, in what order and how we come about that.

(And, to throw in a fun pet issue of mine, this infuriated me about Atlas Shrugged - the idea that solitary geniuses can invent mind-boggling technology and that therefore the rest of society needs to bow down to them. Like, no - once it was known that free energy could come out of the air, the world's scientists would be racing to reproduce this finding, and would probably do so in short order.)

Discoveries unlock more discoveries. When, not if.

Just to defend his honor, Charles Fort was something considerably more than just a science fiction author, and "Lo" wasn't a science fiction novel at all.. If anything he was a historian of the perpetually strange curiosities that sometimes manifest in our world's corners. It's What he's really famous for.

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.

> 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.

That sounds interesting. Like an accidental combination of movie + song + recent news that gives useful insights in some area.

With today's digital tracking, I wonder if we can quantify it: "X% of programming language creators read both Asimov and Terry Pratchett in non-English speaking countries".

> 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.

Oh, you were being literal. That's deep into pseudoscience territory. What's the proposed mechanism for this "broadcast"?

Gravity, the luminiferous ether, psychic, even RF? Who knows. Maybe all rats are multi-furcations of the same rat, and there's squeaky action at distance.

Regardless I don't know how you'd prove this to everyone's satisfaction, it seems real easy to game/cheat.

There’s no mechanism for broadcast, the idea is that the Platonic forms of these ideas are preexisting in the universe.

Or quantum spooky action at a distance?

Sounds like a Torchwood scenario

I knew someone who believed in that. Morphogenetic fields, he called it.

Something about tribes living close to each other, but with no contact, inventing the same stuff. After the first one got a tech, the others would also invent it, but faster.

Seemed a bit far fetched to me. Like, they are living in similar conditions, so it seems reasonable that each of them develops similar tech.

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. :-)

The game concept sounds very fun! Would you not just travel back in time to get there first though? Hoping that kind it twist is in the spirit of the game…

Yes, that is the entire point of the game. All of you are from different periods in history, and you're all traveling back in time to the first day the U.S. Patent Office opens, in order to get the very first patent. But of course since you're all time travelers aiming for the same point in time, you have to interfere with each other in order to actually be the "first" to arrive. It gets very silly.

I was curious about the actual patent no.1:

The first US patent "was granted to Samuel Hopkins for a process of making potash, an ingredient used in fertilizer on July 31."

US Patent No.1 "was granted to Senator John Ruggles for a traction wheel for steam locomotives on July 13. The 9,957 patents granted before the numbering system are now known as the X-patents."

ref: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/milestones

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.

Many inventions simply happen when the environment is ready for them, e.g. manufacturing techniques have advanced to the point where something is possible.

Others get forgotten about because the funding or key manufacturing techniques don’t exist so the idea gets lost.

It can be a long way from a prototype to something worth building at scale.

The sadest are the useful ones that cant access their market, have some risk combined with small margins or an [initial] audience without money.

Not terribly surprising, since using focused light to start fires was known to the ancients. From there, it’s not a huge leap to optics (however crude).

As I understand it, the Vatican astronomers called Galileo out on his claim to have invented the telescope. It didn't stop them from buying a couple of his scopes.

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

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.

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'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.

Yeah. TBH I highly doubt the mainstream, condensed narrative of history. The focus is always on individuals; each invention conveniently having just one inventor, one hero... Whereas in reality, it's almost always a group of people sharing ideas and each making progress until one person stumbles upon the incremental improvement which makes the invention finally useful; that person gets all the credit, everyone else is a footnote, you have to dig into the history to actually learn about those other people. When I read serious history books or articles, I'm often shocked to learn about the contributions made by people I'd never heard of previously. When it comes to mainstream narratives, it's 'early bird gets the worm', there is little regard for contribution quality or even quantity. Someone could be doing most of the work, then some random person who's been quietly following that person's work comes along and delivers just the last missing piece; the frosting on the cake, so to speak, and they get the credit for the entire thing.

There are only a few cases I can think of where people seem to have a semi-realistic view on invention. Children often ask "who invented the computer?" and they are often disappointed by the answer because, it was so drawn-out (multiple generations), so granular, that you can't even make up an approximate answer. People grasping really hard will utter names like Charles Babbage but then acknowledge that there are a huge number of mathematicians, physicists and engineers behind it. Literally anyone who invented anything related to electricity and material science made a contribution too. It's the reality for most inventions that they materialized quickly within a single generation; this created a race situation and simple people basically agreed on some relatable finish line and then named a winner on that basis. The summary of history is written for simpletons; it's a caricature, it characterizes it in some way but it's also comical.

I find this applies to far more than just history. Anything attempting to get widespread appeal must be simplified. So much so, that whenever I notice an agreed upon understanding shared by the mainstream, I start to suspect that it's likely wrong (at least, wrong enough).

Agreed, same with business/entrepreneurship. Employees don't get much credit, even the really talented ones. Also, competitors don't get any credit, even though they may have added valuable competitive pressure which may have inspired and steered the winner to success. Who gets to be the front-man/front-woman for success is heavily timing and luck-oriented.

Simpler, happy stories are easier to tell than ambiguous, chaotic, political, and contentious realities.

I had a giant laundry list. Most of it got build. My one trick was to not build anything but dream up the next thing in stead. It is hilarious to compare notes to see if they got the details right. It usually gives me a feeling as if the collective mind used my idle brain cycles to run other peoples thoughts by. The entire thing may arrive with an unreasonable amount of detail and float away a few hours later only to return in completed form a few years later.

Also funny is to have an idea just complete enough to be able to find the patents.

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.

It was always kind of sus to me that the Rubik's Cube was supposedly simultaneously invented by another guy in Japan.

My favorite conspiracy theory involves the invention of the economic aluminum process.

It is not really a conspiracy but there are a lot of very strange coincidences involved.

A short summary.

Charles Martin Hall worked out the electrolytic method for aluminum refinement in 1886. The same process was also independently discovered that year by Paul Héroult. both men were 22 years old, a strange coincidence. but where it gets really weird is that both men also died the the same year, 1914.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Martin_Hall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_H%C3%A9roult

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