DIRECTIONS: What is odd about this table? None of these pairs worked together.
The thing
Who
When
How close
1. The telephone
Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray
1876
the same day — both filed at the patent office on 14 February
2. The light bulb
Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison
1878–79
a few months apart, on two sides of an ocean. Their companies later merged
3. Natural selection
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
1858
Wallace posted his to Darwin, who had been sitting on the same idea for twenty years
4. Photography
Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot
1839
announced weeks apart, by two men using different methods
5. Calculus
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz
1670s
and they argued about it for the rest of their lives
Five is too many to be luck. If inventing were mostly about one unusual person having one unusual idea, two strangers landing on it in the same year would almost never happen. It happens constantly.
Sheet 10 said a thing arrives when the last thing it needed arrives. Turn that sideways and you have the answer: if something becomes possible in a particular decade, several people will find it in that decade — and not one of them is the reason it happened then.
Explain, using sheet 10, why two strangers so often arrive at the same thing in the same year.
Two Strangers — So Who Invented It?
Why then and not earlier · Page 2 of 2
"Who invented the telephone?" Books give the name the patent office wrote down, on a day when at least two people had it.
If Bell had never been born, what would have happened to the telephone? Say how you would defend your answer.
So is "who invented it" a bad question? Give the case for asking it anyway — there is one.