Asklemmy

51365 readers

572 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

What is a celebrated invention/discovery attributed to a single person but, had they not done it at the time, it is likely that someone else would have done it anyway not long after? (mander.xyz)

submitted 18 hours ago by narwhal@mander.xyz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Bonus question: What is an invention that was really important and there is no telling how long we would have to wait for it to appear had it not been discovered by the one credited with it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 5 points 16 hours ago

I think the telephone sort of fits. It's attributed to Bell but that's mainly because he wiggled his way into a US patent before his competition. The telephone has many fathers though: Bourseul, Manzetti, Reis - just to name three. The latter is also the father of the word telephone but died before it took off. There were many engineers tinkering so if Bell hadn't taken the crown, another person would have done it.

Bonus answer: penicillin. Alexander Flemming. A lucky, accidental discovery. If mold hadn't gotten sloppily into his cultures we might all have died of the plague or something nice like that.