It was said that had the transistor not been discovered at Bell Labs, it would have developed somewhere else in the world within years. In fact, very similar w

It was said that had the transistor not been discovered at Bell Labs, it would have developed somewhere else in the world within years. In fact, very similar work was taking place at Westinghouse in France under Mataré [0] and Heinrich Welker. On the other hand, with Information Theory, Shannon was considered to have been ahead by decades. The closest related work that is considered to come from an independent line of inquiry (taking place in the USSR), but similarly fundamental is Kolmogorov complexity (algorithmic entropy) by Andrey Kolmogorov [1] in 1963. While Shannon made the huge leap on his own, it should be noted that Harry Nyquist [2] (his colleague at Bell Labs) laid essential foundations through his Nyquist Stability Criterion and studies on bandwidth. This came after harmonic analysis (Fourier transform, etc.) appeared in the 1800s. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Matar%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Matar%C3%A9 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist