Could two people simultaneously discover the solution to Bessler's wheel?

It's not that unlikely. In the 1870s, two inventors, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically, the telephone. Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won.

I must make a correction to an incorrect fact in the above paragraph, thanks to Jon Hutton's timely message.

"Italy hailed the redress of a historic injustice yesterday after the US Congress recognised an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell.

Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognise a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death. 

The vote by the House of Representatives prompted joyous claims in Meucci's homeland that finally Bell had been outed as a perfidious Scot who found fortune and fame by stealing another man's work. 

Calling the Italian's career extraordinary and tragic, the resolution said his "teletrofono", demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials and who took out a patent 16 years later." 

As I said to Jon, let us hope we too can right a wrong from history and place Bessler where he should be, in the hall of famous inventors and not on a list of infamous fraudsters.

Then there was the case of Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray of Bell Telephone Laboratories who gave a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television on April 7, 1927.  In the same year, 1927, John Logie Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow.

Even Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz became embroiled in an argument over who discovered calculus first.Even Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz became embroiled in an argument over who discovered calculus first.

If only one man ever discovered the secret and no one else in the subsequent 300 years has succeeded, why now - and why more than one person?  There is a concept known as multiple discovery.  It suggests that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors. This is the reverse of traditional view - the 'singleton' or 'heroic' theory. Historians and sociologists have remarked on the occurrence, in science, of these multiple independent discoveryies. Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. "Sometimes the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."

The various Nobel prizes awarded each year in each field of study comprise not just one winner but two or even three, often because more than one person may have made the same significant discovery at more or less the same time.

Generally one can see how this might happen.  A particular subject is usually chosen by an individual because it has some relevance at the time or place of the researcher.  And if more than one should choose this because the circumstances of choosing are similar, then the subject has probably been discussed in at least both those places and perhaps more widely discussed and possible avenues of progress explored.  It is  but a short step to two or more researchers following up the same clues and reaching the same conclusions independantly of each other.

We here in the Bessler field of research certainly share some of the same attributes mentioned above, I think therefore, there is a real chance of two or more people solving Bessler's wheel at the same moment.  So if I'm one of them, who else it nearly there?  :-)

JC

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