So this strikes to the heart of a frustration I have. When I was younger, I took debates over "who invented X" at face value, based on how engaged and serious

So this strikes to the heart of a frustration I have. When I was younger, I took debates over "who invented X" at face value, based on how engaged and serious others were about them: That person alone had the idea first, all by themselves, and realized it. As an adult of course I realize the world is much more complicated. By and large, inventions don't happen in a vacuum, they occur when their time has come. Knowledge/ideas/theory/precursors are floating about, often there is a community of people already engaged in the area, and then at best someone makes a notable contribution or excels at integration, often boosted by fortuitous circumstances. Yet these topics are rarely if ever reported on that way. At most you get a "someone else had written about it already in a paper" + debate about the chances the inventor had known and read about the paper (I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not). For examples like this I'd love to read a more nuanced piece that takes me into the inventor's world first: What were the hot topics of their day? What devices were known to them already? Who were they in contact with? What inspired them? What allowed them to get organized and pursue a particular path? etc. More often than not invention is a long process that involves multiple heads and years to decades. I think I want a book like "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, which really excels at sketching the milieu of first-half 20th century physics, but with Turing, von Neumann, Zuse, etc. instead ...