How did inventions happen simultaneously by different people if "god" didn't show us?

[cinnard]

Quoting:

"One hour before Alexander Graham Bell registered his patent for the telephone in 1876, Elisha Gray patented his design. After years of litigation, the patent went to Bell.

In 1669, the principles of differential calculus were determined by Sir Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany at about the same time.

Gray invented the first electronic musical instrument. At the same time, around 1874, Bell had also designed an experimental “Electric Harp” for speech transmission over a telephone line using similar technology to Gray’s.

At 10:35 on Friday 17 December 1903, Orville Wright took the Flyer that he and his brother Wilbur built into the air for what has come to be known as the first powered flight. Earlier, unbeknownst to them, Gustave Whitehead and Richard Pearse were also experimenting with flying machines. Who actually took first to the sky remains a controversy.

In 1926 in Scotland, John Logie Baird demonstrated a machine that transmits movie pictures using radio technology, calling it a “televisor.” At the same time, Philo Fansworth was toiling away in San Francisco on his concept for television. They weren’t the only ones working on a TV model, though. Vladmir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant to New York, was working on athode-ray tubes, with the backing of David Sarnoff, the tech-savvy marketer who started NBC.

Without the one knowing about the other, Jack Kilby from Texas and Robert Noyce from California invented the integrated circuit in 1958.

In a New Yorker article about Nathan Myhrvold's idea factory, Malcolm Gladwell surfaces the scholarly work of researchers into the history of science who contend that simulatenous discover of inventions is the norm. In any period, ideas are discovered at the same time. Even big ideas. This is true for the past, present, and in different cultures. As Gladwell writes:

They found 148 major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland. “There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,” Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:

The law of the conservation of energy was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. There were six different inventors of the thermometer and nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.

Nikola Tesla's got solutions to his inventions in vivid VISIONS. Strong flashes of light often accompanied these images. He would wave his hand in front of his eyes to determine whether the objects were simply in his mind or outside


How did these invention ideas come simultaneous to completely different people? And so many times that it cannot be a coincidence. There could be a higher power showing these to us.

[hwistlere31]

zeus or thor?

[osmont]

People don't live in a vacuum - inventors are all reading similar literature and may often be aware of the work of other inventors.

[kalvin71]

And every time that something is not invented simultaneously, that is proof it is from Satan.

[leonie36]

Uh yeah, it was magic.

Have you considered that new many new technologies rely on old ones to come about first?

Like the telephone, for example.

And have you considered the fact that Tesla was a total maniac?

...

[eliot]

If you wanna bring that theory on, which for me makes no sense, at least talk about the pyramids and not 18th and 19th century inventions because these make complete sense as we have lots of info about their discovery and everything can be explained. Plus inventions are like equations, when you know one variable you easily discover the other and so on...

[tai38]

I don't even understand your line of logic here.

People were trying to make the same scientific breakthroughs around the world therefore Jesus is the son of God? WTF?

[merla15]

You dont know much about how academia works do you dear, scientists publish papers all teh time detailing the state of their studies, always have, and its always been called peer review.

[anglesey34]

lol today you have scientists all over the world searching for a better widget. There generally are but a few ways to do things--it's having the inspiration to find the particular way. NOthing divine or higher power here--figure there were probably 1000 scientists at the time working on try to develop the telephone--not surprising at all. I personally have filed patents that were issued-that were a day ahead of our competentiton. And I'm an atheist--so your "god" helped me lol.

Sorry--lotsa people working on or interested in the same ideas lead to things like this on a regular basis--no sky monkey required.

[atworth49]

This happens a lot. It is because the sum of knowledge that we have in any field is studied universally by people in the same field in different parts of the world. This opens up new ideas and possibilities, leading to many people trying to make them reality at the same time and in different places and in different ways.
I was just listening to Bill Bryson's 'Short History of nearly everything' whilst decorating and he states how often it happens that there are a few gifted people in every generation trying to build on established knowledge who invent or discover the same thing at the same time or do the same experiments that necessarily lead to discovering the same thing.
One of the main aims of his book is to tell people who actually got there first because so often the person who did was not important enough to be listened to and someone more influential gets credit even tho they got there later but the records exist of the first person to really discover or invent it. You might enjoy that book. Bryson shows how the information and understanding accumulates and makes new important discoveries possible and then there is a bit of a race to see who gets there first and quite often, before modern media, it happens at the same time in different places as you say.