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The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless, because the largest part of the invention is collective. Once the environment is ready, many people c

The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless, because the largest part of the invention is collective. Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors. Without the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont, aviation might have been created a few years later, but, overall, the consequence would have been small.

xoa 2y ago
I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. And how the pieces come together can change the course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016 and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down. You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
  - db48x 2y ago
    We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of travel time instead of months, and much larger payload fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was revealed just how dangerous the they were.
    - diffuse_l 2y ago
      It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it. Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible
      - db48x 2y ago
        It took another accident before anyone took the danger seriously enough to ground the Shuttle.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    SpaceX has made a lot of real advancements while delivering real launches. You're thinking of Boeing.
    - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      Space in the US has always been extremely political. SpaceX is a more recent kind of politicisation which happens to be palatable to the current neoliberal orthodoxy, which follows the usual cycle of "break something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is." If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.
plastic3169 2y ago
My favorite is that luggage with wheels was invented in 1972. The tech was there already. We just waited for somebody to invent it.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Did it wait for someone to invent it, or for it to make economical sense to put this tech in that particular application?
  - Zaiberia 2y ago
    You can’t little wheely luggage until it’s little wheely luggage time?
    - lukan 2y ago
      Not on unpaved, bumpy roads.
    - beedeebeedee 2y ago
      Nor if you have a class of low paid (and before that unpaid) people who carried luggage for travelers. There was a lot of social change in the US after the 1960's, and travel only became democratized recently.
      - setr 2y ago
        You have this in India today, yet wheeled luggage has completely displaced unwheeled in any airport
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Presumably that's because most of the people flying in or out are traveling from/to other countries, and it makes no sense for them to own one set of luggage for India, and another for the rest of the planet, especially if the latter is compatible with the former anyway.
billy99k 2y ago
We don't really know this. People like this only come around once in a generation.
rtkwe 2y ago
It's a big deficiency in the way history is taught, at least here in the US, it's mostly taught as Guy/Group X did Y in year ZZZZ and leaves out a lot of the context that shows how many people were often doing similar things before or simultaneously. It leads a lot of people to buy into the Great Man of History view point when there's rarely singular figures that the the principal cause, often they're just the one who won.
- emursebrian 2y ago
  We had a history teacher in high school who noted that. He always tried to cover the factors that led up to an event happening. I always appreciated that. Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    My history teacher in middle school really liked to tell us the idea of "historical determinism" whenever an individual appeared to have changed the course of history. Of course that theory doesn't place enough emphasis on individual effort or even their free will. But I guess I appreciated the alternate viewpoint.
    - ecshafer 2y ago
      I have this complaint about a lot of more modern history, which is that the idea of the great man theory is so abhorrent that some historians have started to treat the concept of free will as non-existent where the forces of history are so powerful things were all but inevitable. People are driven by economic, environmental, and societal factors. But sometimes there is an individual that makes things move one way or another. I usually like to take the example of WWI, it was probably going to happen regardless in Europe eventually. But King Wilhelm II was an individual that has specific psychological aspects that drove it to happen the way it did. A different king would not have created the alliance situation that made the specific powers fight on their specific side. If King Wilhelm didn't try and emulate and thus alienate England, we might have seen England and Germany against Russia and France.
deleted 2y ago
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marcosdumay 2y ago
Well, this is true for the airplane, but it really doesn't apply to every invention. Some things only exist because a single person got too outside of the groupthinking, or decided to dedicate their life into making it.
- diego_moita 2y ago
  Who really "invented" computers? Babbage? Alan Turing? Konrad Zuse? John Von Neumann? Mauchley & Eckert? Who invented calculus? Leibniz? Newton? Same goes to the Fast Fourier Transform, CRISPR-CAS9, etc.
- evgen 2y ago
  Can you provide an example of this? There are a few inventions-via-serendipity (e.g. Teflon) where someone got lucky, but few that i can think of where the specific person who got lucky mattered. Kary Mullis and PCR maybe?
  - sashank_1509 2y ago
    Some examples from Deep learning: AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training convnets on GPU’s in 2009? OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was only OpenAI training larger and larger language models. TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1 person or group did not exist.
    - somethingsome 2y ago
      Il sorry to bomb your comment, but I saw on another thread that you followed CMU intro to DL and had a beautiful time doing all the homework.But I didn't find your contact info. Do you happen to still have the homework questions/solutions somewhere ? At the moment the new ones are locked behind CMU credentials.
TimTheTinker 2y ago
> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless Perhaps you're right in a technical/technological sense. But there's a deeper question I think we need to explore: will we as American citizens be patriots? (where by patriots I mean simply people who love their country and fellow countrymen/women and have a shared cultural identity). Brazil ought to be lauded for their fierce patriotism. Their insistence that Dumont is the real inventor is great - it means they care about their shared history and cultural identity. It's part of how Brazilians as a people-group care about and love one another. US citizens ought to feel the same way about the Wright brothers. As a citizen myself, I'm proud to say that the Wright brothers were the first to fly an airplane that carried a human. It matters to me because this is my country. If you're a US citizen, it should matter to you too. -- Zooming out a bit... A house divided against itself cannot stand. Love is what holds families together. To love family members is to care for and prefer them more than people outside the family -- that is a good thing. A strong family with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the family. In the same way, a country divided against itself cannot stand; and love is what holds countries together. To love fellow countrymen/women is to care and prefer them more than people outside the country -- that is a good thing. A strong country with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the country. We need that in the US (and many places in the West) again. TA isn't so much about who is "right" but the difference between Brazilian national identity and the USA (which used to have a strong national identity).
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important? National identity is a relatively recent concept so it’s clearly not essential or fundamental to human culture. It’s not clear to me why I should care more about people in New York (2000 miles away but part of the same geopolitical entity) more than people in Brazil.
  - TimTheTinker 2y ago
    > Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important? I take it as given that (a) individual human flourishing is an important and worthy goal, (b) love (seeking the good of others) and hard work are the principal means of attaining that goal, and (c) formal human institutions (like marriage, family, and country) are the best means of organizing the human relationships and activities that fall under [b]. Given (a), (b), and (c), it follows that: - to promote the health and flourishing of those institutions is to promote human flourishing itself - thoughtfully managing shared values and expectations of members in those institutions promotes flourishing of the institutions - love and preference for other members of each institution promotes the health of its members and of the institution itself I also posit (but don't have the space/time to work out the reasoning) that just as individual people should not live for themselves only, each institution must not exist merely for its own sake, but also for the good of those outside of it; that its own internal health and cohesion is an important prerequisite for being able to effectively benefit the rest of society; and that institutions that exist solely for their own sake with zero outreach are unhealthy. However, to say that an institution is wrong or unhealthy because members of it love each other more than people outside the institution is to deny that the institution itself is a good thing. We intuitively know that healthy married people love each other more than others, and that healthy family members love each other more than others. In a healthy company, we work for the good of our own company first, not other companies. The same principle should apply to countries. To reduce the principle to a pithy saying: "Put your own [country's] oxygen mask on first." > National identity is a relatively recent concept I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Every successful society since ancient history, from local tribes to the great ancient empires to modern countries had (at a minimum) social cohesion, shared values, and a shared identity. Individual members of Visigoth and Viking tribes identified as Visigoths and Vikings and had a shared sense of identity; same with Greeks, Romans, Germans, French, English, Swedish, etc. The United States at its inception and for a long time afterwards was no exception. This doesn't mean we should be unfriendly and not care about others. Love is not a zero-sum game. Members of families that are affectionate to one another also feel very loving to people outside the family. The healthiest countries in the last 100 years were also some of the best international partners and best places to travel...
lotharcable 2y ago
What made Wright Brothers the first, and not Santos Dumont or other people is that they not only created the first flying machine, they developed critical _PRINCIPALS_ of heavier then air flight that is used in every fixed wing aircraft since then. Without Wright Brothers' innovations controlled flight is simply impossible. Other people had things that looked similar to the Wright airplanes, but only the Wright airplane was able to take off, do figure 8s in the sky, and then land. For example the rest of the world was operating off of aerodynamic mathematics of lift and drag that was simply incorrect. The Wright brothers built the air tunnels and created the math for better ones that actually worked. The also figured out the principals to using rudders to counter adverse yaw in controlled flight. This is the tendency of the airplane to turn (yaw) against the direction of a turn. And there are a few things beyond that. Without this controlled flight is not possible. Without figuring these things out airplanes are not really possible. Now would of somebody else eventually figured it out? Sure. But it was the Wright brothers that did it first and that is the point. This is why they were able to create the first airplane and other people didn't. Even if they looked very similar it doesn't matter because they didn't incorporate the necessary features that made the Wright's plane work.
- eej71 2y ago
  The Wright Brothers biography by David McCullough does a great job of covering the details here.
mritchie712 2y ago
This was a surprising one for me: During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries: - *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*: Both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton formulated his version in the 1660s but didn't publish it immediately. Leibniz began his work on calculus in the 1670s and published his findings in the late 17th century. This led to a prolonged dispute over who first invented calculus. - *Robert Hooke*: Hooke proposed ideas about planetary motion and gravitation. In the 1670s, he suggested that planets are attracted to the Sun by a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This concept influenced Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation, though the two scientists had intense arguments over the credit for this discovery. - *James Gregory*: A Scottish mathematician, Gregory made significant contributions to calculus and series expansions. He discovered the series expansion for the inverse tangent function, known as Gregory's series, and worked on methods of calculating areas under curves, which are fundamental aspects of calculus. These instances highlight the phenomenon of multiple discovery, where different scientists independently arrive at similar conclusions around the same time.
- christina97 2y ago
  Thanks ChatGPT.
  - FergusArgyll 2y ago
    When will people realize that pasting markdown is a dead giveaway?
    - kragen 2y ago
      Anybody who publishes on GitHub, Reddit, or Stack Overflow is pretty familiar with some variant of Markdown. People have been accidentally posting Markdown on HN much longer than there have been LLMs.
    - mritchie712 2y ago
      why would I write that myself when chatgpt can do it 10x faster? I knew there were several people working on the same thing as Newton at the exact same time. I didn't know the exact dates and their names. What would you do, Google it all? Good choice.
zeven7 2y ago
Some things aren’t like that. GR comes to mind. (Hilbert was working on it also, but only because he started as a collaborator of Einstein.)
- vlovich123 2y ago
  It’s one of the reasons I disagree with NDT and other popular scientists that Newton was the greatest scientist. Einstein was singular in that respect that he was the only one even thinking about spacetime as a geometric entity. Calculus and gravity, were already all things others were working on and making similar strides. Newton just got there first and while he’s definitely a unique genius and impressive in the breadth of things he accomplished, that takes away for me when comparing him with Einstein. I think his most unique work may have been the contributions to optics but stacked up against a fundamental description of what gravity and time are that completely changed our thinking on it… Not to mention that still to this day 100 years later we’re building machines to verify some of Einstein’s predictions. Oh and he invented the idea of lasers despite not believing in quantum mechanics. Not to mention that Newton’s foundational contributions to math and science stopped around 28 when he started focusing on alchemy and other things. By comparison Einstein kept making contributions to physics throughout his life and his contributions “stopped” when he focus on the grand unifying theory trying to bridge quantum mechanics and relativity, a problem still unsolved 70 years after his death despite an accelerating understanding and technology in the world of physics.
- necovek 2y ago
  Not discounting Einstein's singular contributions, but he had help in putting Riemannian (also called Bolshai-Lobachevsky in other parts of the world ;)) geometry to use: > This idea was pointed out by mathematician Marcel Grossmann and published by Grossmann and Einstein in 1913.[7] (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)
  - raattgift 2y ago
    In most mathematical circles, Bolyai-Lobachevsky geometry is strictly a (family of non-Euclidian) hyperbolic geometry. János Bolyai, not Bolshai. And certainly in the 1820s-1830s he investigated the Euclidean parallel postulate, arriving at a hyperbolic geometry in which it does not hold true (i.e., initially close parallel lines diverge), and eventually studying geometries which take no position on the parallel postulate. Lobachevsky also independently arrived at a hyperbolic geometry, and continued develop a substitute postulate for the parallel postulate. However, all of the above is several long steps before developing differential geometry with its inner products encoding angles and distances on the tangent spaces at each point on an arbitrarily curved smooth manifold of higher dimensions, and an even longer one from the pseudo-Riemannian manifold of 3+1d General Relativity. Although many hands contributed to the positive inner product -> non-degenerate inner product, the reason anyone was doing that was because of Einstein's work on gravitation (in turn provoked in part by Poincaré's 1905 argument about Lorentz-invariance of the wave equation for gravitation, in the spirit of Special Relativity).
Aurornis 2y ago
> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless, I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative. Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together. Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together. Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected. I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.
- akie 2y ago
  Who created the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer? And why does everyone think it's an American, 4 years later? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) History is not a collection of objective records.
  - necovek 2y ago
    Even that Wikipedia page has this snippet: In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse, however, did not know of Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[11]: 149 for his first computer Z1, which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    I believe that invention was a bit controversial, for some reason...
    - oytis 2y ago
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sebastian_z 2y ago
That is also the reason why patents are of limited duration.
nkozyra 2y ago
I agree, which is why the Wright Brothers less "invented flight" than "had the first sustained engine-powered flight." A lot of historical documents describe it similarly to the latter, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue. I think there's a loose threshold for when something is "viable," and that becomes the genesis of invention. Even in the Wright Brothers' case, the first flight was viable only in demonstration, there was no practical application for a few generations of aircraft. And as this article highlights, US hegemony kind of ruled via the "winners write history" theory. Which is why some people still say Edison invented the light bulb.
intalentive 2y ago
Saying “who invented this?” is how the collective celebrates, strengthens and participates in its own tradition. In every field the neophyte meets illustrious predecessors who paved the way.
deadbabe 2y ago
This is classic survivorship bias. We don’t know about the things that didn’t get invented because someone somewhere didn’t do a critical breakthrough, because those things don’t exist. Therefore, it’s easy for people to assume that everything eventually gets invented, and nothing really hinges on a single person. We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.
- ufmace 2y ago
  > We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision. No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other critical technologies that were necessary to make steam engines more than a toy. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
- ahtihn 2y ago
  > We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier My understanding is that no, it couldn't have happened at that time because metallurgy wasn't good enough at the time for anything beyond toys.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors. Correct. The electric bulb had at least 12 inventors and radio communication at lest 3 inventors.
johnisgood 2y ago
It is nationalist. Type in "Hungarian inventions". You will see: computer (Neumann), holography, discovery of vitamin C, ballpoint pen, helicopter, electric locomotive, telephone exchange, Word and Excel, and so forth. I mean, I am Hungarian, so what? Why should I be proud "to be Hungarian" because those things were invented by Hungarians (outside of Hungary, mostly in the US I believe)? I don't get it.
deleted 2y ago
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TacticalCoder 2y ago
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xoa 2y ago

I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. And how the pieces come together can change the course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016 and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down. You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
- db48x 2y ago
  We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of travel time instead of months, and much larger payload fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was revealed just how dangerous the they were.
  - diffuse_l 2y ago
    It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it. Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible
    - db48x 2y ago
      It took another accident before anyone took the danger seriously enough to ground the Shuttle.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  SpaceX has made a lot of real advancements while delivering real launches. You're thinking of Boeing.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    Space in the US has always been extremely political. SpaceX is a more recent kind of politicisation which happens to be palatable to the current neoliberal orthodoxy, which follows the usual cycle of "break something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is." If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.

plastic3169 2y ago

My favorite is that luggage with wheels was invented in 1972. The tech was there already. We just waited for somebody to invent it.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Did it wait for someone to invent it, or for it to make economical sense to put this tech in that particular application?
- Zaiberia 2y ago
  You can’t little wheely luggage until it’s little wheely luggage time?
  - lukan 2y ago
    Not on unpaved, bumpy roads.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    Nor if you have a class of low paid (and before that unpaid) people who carried luggage for travelers. There was a lot of social change in the US after the 1960's, and travel only became democratized recently.
    - setr 2y ago
      You have this in India today, yet wheeled luggage has completely displaced unwheeled in any airport
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Presumably that's because most of the people flying in or out are traveling from/to other countries, and it makes no sense for them to own one set of luggage for India, and another for the rest of the planet, especially if the latter is compatible with the former anyway.

billy99k 2y ago

We don't really know this. People like this only come around once in a generation.

rtkwe 2y ago

It's a big deficiency in the way history is taught, at least here in the US, it's mostly taught as Guy/Group X did Y in year ZZZZ and leaves out a lot of the context that shows how many people were often doing similar things before or simultaneously. It leads a lot of people to buy into the Great Man of History view point when there's rarely singular figures that the the principal cause, often they're just the one who won.

emursebrian 2y ago
We had a history teacher in high school who noted that. He always tried to cover the factors that led up to an event happening. I always appreciated that. Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".
- kccqzy 2y ago
  My history teacher in middle school really liked to tell us the idea of "historical determinism" whenever an individual appeared to have changed the course of history. Of course that theory doesn't place enough emphasis on individual effort or even their free will. But I guess I appreciated the alternate viewpoint.
  - ecshafer 2y ago
    I have this complaint about a lot of more modern history, which is that the idea of the great man theory is so abhorrent that some historians have started to treat the concept of free will as non-existent where the forces of history are so powerful things were all but inevitable. People are driven by economic, environmental, and societal factors. But sometimes there is an individual that makes things move one way or another. I usually like to take the example of WWI, it was probably going to happen regardless in Europe eventually. But King Wilhelm II was an individual that has specific psychological aspects that drove it to happen the way it did. A different king would not have created the alliance situation that made the specific powers fight on their specific side. If King Wilhelm didn't try and emulate and thus alienate England, we might have seen England and Germany against Russia and France.

deleted 2y ago

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marcosdumay 2y ago

Well, this is true for the airplane, but it really doesn't apply to every invention. Some things only exist because a single person got too outside of the groupthinking, or decided to dedicate their life into making it.

diego_moita 2y ago
Who really "invented" computers? Babbage? Alan Turing? Konrad Zuse? John Von Neumann? Mauchley & Eckert? Who invented calculus? Leibniz? Newton? Same goes to the Fast Fourier Transform, CRISPR-CAS9, etc.
evgen 2y ago
Can you provide an example of this? There are a few inventions-via-serendipity (e.g. Teflon) where someone got lucky, but few that i can think of where the specific person who got lucky mattered. Kary Mullis and PCR maybe?
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  Some examples from Deep learning: AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training convnets on GPU’s in 2009? OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was only OpenAI training larger and larger language models. TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1 person or group did not exist.
  - somethingsome 2y ago
    Il sorry to bomb your comment, but I saw on another thread that you followed CMU intro to DL and had a beautiful time doing all the homework.But I didn't find your contact info. Do you happen to still have the homework questions/solutions somewhere ? At the moment the new ones are locked behind CMU credentials.

TimTheTinker 2y ago

> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless Perhaps you're right in a technical/technological sense. But there's a deeper question I think we need to explore: will we as American citizens be patriots? (where by patriots I mean simply people who love their country and fellow countrymen/women and have a shared cultural identity). Brazil ought to be lauded for their fierce patriotism. Their insistence that Dumont is the real inventor is great - it means they care about their shared history and cultural identity. It's part of how Brazilians as a people-group care about and love one another. US citizens ought to feel the same way about the Wright brothers. As a citizen myself, I'm proud to say that the Wright brothers were the first to fly an airplane that carried a human. It matters to me because this is my country. If you're a US citizen, it should matter to you too. -- Zooming out a bit... A house divided against itself cannot stand. Love is what holds families together. To love family members is to care for and prefer them more than people outside the family -- that is a good thing. A strong family with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the family. In the same way, a country divided against itself cannot stand; and love is what holds countries together. To love fellow countrymen/women is to care and prefer them more than people outside the country -- that is a good thing. A strong country with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the country. We need that in the US (and many places in the West) again. TA isn't so much about who is "right" but the difference between Brazilian national identity and the USA (which used to have a strong national identity).

School-Cotton 2y ago
Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important? National identity is a relatively recent concept so it’s clearly not essential or fundamental to human culture. It’s not clear to me why I should care more about people in New York (2000 miles away but part of the same geopolitical entity) more than people in Brazil.
- TimTheTinker 2y ago
  > Can you explain from first principles why you think it’s important? I take it as given that (a) individual human flourishing is an important and worthy goal, (b) love (seeking the good of others) and hard work are the principal means of attaining that goal, and (c) formal human institutions (like marriage, family, and country) are the best means of organizing the human relationships and activities that fall under [b]. Given (a), (b), and (c), it follows that: - to promote the health and flourishing of those institutions is to promote human flourishing itself - thoughtfully managing shared values and expectations of members in those institutions promotes flourishing of the institutions - love and preference for other members of each institution promotes the health of its members and of the institution itself I also posit (but don't have the space/time to work out the reasoning) that just as individual people should not live for themselves only, each institution must not exist merely for its own sake, but also for the good of those outside of it; that its own internal health and cohesion is an important prerequisite for being able to effectively benefit the rest of society; and that institutions that exist solely for their own sake with zero outreach are unhealthy. However, to say that an institution is wrong or unhealthy because members of it love each other more than people outside the institution is to deny that the institution itself is a good thing. We intuitively know that healthy married people love each other more than others, and that healthy family members love each other more than others. In a healthy company, we work for the good of our own company first, not other companies. The same principle should apply to countries. To reduce the principle to a pithy saying: "Put your own [country's] oxygen mask on first." > National identity is a relatively recent concept I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Every successful society since ancient history, from local tribes to the great ancient empires to modern countries had (at a minimum) social cohesion, shared values, and a shared identity. Individual members of Visigoth and Viking tribes identified as Visigoths and Vikings and had a shared sense of identity; same with Greeks, Romans, Germans, French, English, Swedish, etc. The United States at its inception and for a long time afterwards was no exception. This doesn't mean we should be unfriendly and not care about others. Love is not a zero-sum game. Members of families that are affectionate to one another also feel very loving to people outside the family. The healthiest countries in the last 100 years were also some of the best international partners and best places to travel...

lotharcable 2y ago

What made Wright Brothers the first, and not Santos Dumont or other people is that they not only created the first flying machine, they developed critical _PRINCIPALS_ of heavier then air flight that is used in every fixed wing aircraft since then. Without Wright Brothers' innovations controlled flight is simply impossible. Other people had things that looked similar to the Wright airplanes, but only the Wright airplane was able to take off, do figure 8s in the sky, and then land. For example the rest of the world was operating off of aerodynamic mathematics of lift and drag that was simply incorrect. The Wright brothers built the air tunnels and created the math for better ones that actually worked. The also figured out the principals to using rudders to counter adverse yaw in controlled flight. This is the tendency of the airplane to turn (yaw) against the direction of a turn. And there are a few things beyond that. Without this controlled flight is not possible. Without figuring these things out airplanes are not really possible. Now would of somebody else eventually figured it out? Sure. But it was the Wright brothers that did it first and that is the point. This is why they were able to create the first airplane and other people didn't. Even if they looked very similar it doesn't matter because they didn't incorporate the necessary features that made the Wright's plane work.

eej71 2y ago
The Wright Brothers biography by David McCullough does a great job of covering the details here.

mritchie712 2y ago

This was a surprising one for me: During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries: - *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*: Both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton formulated his version in the 1660s but didn't publish it immediately. Leibniz began his work on calculus in the 1670s and published his findings in the late 17th century. This led to a prolonged dispute over who first invented calculus. - *Robert Hooke*: Hooke proposed ideas about planetary motion and gravitation. In the 1670s, he suggested that planets are attracted to the Sun by a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This concept influenced Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation, though the two scientists had intense arguments over the credit for this discovery. - *James Gregory*: A Scottish mathematician, Gregory made significant contributions to calculus and series expansions. He discovered the series expansion for the inverse tangent function, known as Gregory's series, and worked on methods of calculating areas under curves, which are fundamental aspects of calculus. These instances highlight the phenomenon of multiple discovery, where different scientists independently arrive at similar conclusions around the same time.

christina97 2y ago
Thanks ChatGPT.
- FergusArgyll 2y ago
  When will people realize that pasting markdown is a dead giveaway?
  - kragen 2y ago
    Anybody who publishes on GitHub, Reddit, or Stack Overflow is pretty familiar with some variant of Markdown. People have been accidentally posting Markdown on HN much longer than there have been LLMs.
  - mritchie712 2y ago
    why would I write that myself when chatgpt can do it 10x faster? I knew there were several people working on the same thing as Newton at the exact same time. I didn't know the exact dates and their names. What would you do, Google it all? Good choice.

zeven7 2y ago

Some things aren’t like that. GR comes to mind. (Hilbert was working on it also, but only because he started as a collaborator of Einstein.)

vlovich123 2y ago
It’s one of the reasons I disagree with NDT and other popular scientists that Newton was the greatest scientist. Einstein was singular in that respect that he was the only one even thinking about spacetime as a geometric entity. Calculus and gravity, were already all things others were working on and making similar strides. Newton just got there first and while he’s definitely a unique genius and impressive in the breadth of things he accomplished, that takes away for me when comparing him with Einstein. I think his most unique work may have been the contributions to optics but stacked up against a fundamental description of what gravity and time are that completely changed our thinking on it… Not to mention that still to this day 100 years later we’re building machines to verify some of Einstein’s predictions. Oh and he invented the idea of lasers despite not believing in quantum mechanics. Not to mention that Newton’s foundational contributions to math and science stopped around 28 when he started focusing on alchemy and other things. By comparison Einstein kept making contributions to physics throughout his life and his contributions “stopped” when he focus on the grand unifying theory trying to bridge quantum mechanics and relativity, a problem still unsolved 70 years after his death despite an accelerating understanding and technology in the world of physics.
necovek 2y ago
Not discounting Einstein's singular contributions, but he had help in putting Riemannian (also called Bolshai-Lobachevsky in other parts of the world ;)) geometry to use: > This idea was pointed out by mathematician Marcel Grossmann and published by Grossmann and Einstein in 1913.[7] (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)
- raattgift 2y ago
  In most mathematical circles, Bolyai-Lobachevsky geometry is strictly a (family of non-Euclidian) hyperbolic geometry. János Bolyai, not Bolshai. And certainly in the 1820s-1830s he investigated the Euclidean parallel postulate, arriving at a hyperbolic geometry in which it does not hold true (i.e., initially close parallel lines diverge), and eventually studying geometries which take no position on the parallel postulate. Lobachevsky also independently arrived at a hyperbolic geometry, and continued develop a substitute postulate for the parallel postulate. However, all of the above is several long steps before developing differential geometry with its inner products encoding angles and distances on the tangent spaces at each point on an arbitrarily curved smooth manifold of higher dimensions, and an even longer one from the pseudo-Riemannian manifold of 3+1d General Relativity. Although many hands contributed to the positive inner product -> non-degenerate inner product, the reason anyone was doing that was because of Einstein's work on gravitation (in turn provoked in part by Poincaré's 1905 argument about Lorentz-invariance of the wave equation for gravitation, in the spirit of Special Relativity).

Aurornis 2y ago

> The question "Who invented this?" is most often pointless, I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative. Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together. Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together. Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected. I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.

akie 2y ago
Who created the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer? And why does everyone think it's an American, 4 years later? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) History is not a collection of objective records.
- necovek 2y ago
  Even that Wikipedia page has this snippet: In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse, however, did not know of Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[11]: 149 for his first computer Z1, which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I believe that invention was a bit controversial, for some reason...
  - oytis 2y ago

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sebastian_z 2y ago

That is also the reason why patents are of limited duration.

nkozyra 2y ago

I agree, which is why the Wright Brothers less "invented flight" than "had the first sustained engine-powered flight." A lot of historical documents describe it similarly to the latter, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue. I think there's a loose threshold for when something is "viable," and that becomes the genesis of invention. Even in the Wright Brothers' case, the first flight was viable only in demonstration, there was no practical application for a few generations of aircraft. And as this article highlights, US hegemony kind of ruled via the "winners write history" theory. Which is why some people still say Edison invented the light bulb.

intalentive 2y ago

Saying “who invented this?” is how the collective celebrates, strengthens and participates in its own tradition. In every field the neophyte meets illustrious predecessors who paved the way.

deadbabe 2y ago

This is classic survivorship bias. We don’t know about the things that didn’t get invented because someone somewhere didn’t do a critical breakthrough, because those things don’t exist. Therefore, it’s easy for people to assume that everything eventually gets invented, and nothing really hinges on a single person. We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.

ufmace 2y ago
> We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision. No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other critical technologies that were necessary to make steam engines more than a toy. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
ahtihn 2y ago
> We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier My understanding is that no, it couldn't have happened at that time because metallurgy wasn't good enough at the time for anything beyond toys.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>Once the environment is ready, many people can invent on the shoulders of their predecessors. Correct. The electric bulb had at least 12 inventors and radio communication at lest 3 inventors.

johnisgood 2y ago

It is nationalist. Type in "Hungarian inventions". You will see: computer (Neumann), holography, discovery of vitamin C, ballpoint pen, helicopter, electric locomotive, telephone exchange, Word and Excel, and so forth. I mean, I am Hungarian, so what? Why should I be proud "to be Hungarian" because those things were invented by Hungarians (outside of Hungary, mostly in the US I believe)? I don't get it.

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TacticalCoder 2y ago

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