User talk:John Barleycorn's Revenge
LIST OF MULTIPLE INVENTIONS / DISCOVERIES:
Pending finding out what ought and what ought not to be located in the page on this topic, I am listing a few multiples that I've wandered across, in this space:
- First loop (flying): Adolphe Pégoud and Pyotr Nesterov in September 1913 (about two weeks apart).
- First sighting of Uranus: John Flamsteed in 1690 (he misidentified it as a star) followed by William Herschel & Pierre Lemonnier in the 1700s.
- Brian May made a discovery in astrophysics (not sure just what), left the subject alone for 30 years & returned to it---perhaps a good example of a "singleton"?
- Discovery of NeptuneVerrier, Galle & Adams all found the planet at around the same time in 1846.
- Prediction of the Kuiper Belt by both Kenneth Edgeworth (1941) and Gerard Kuiper (1953).
PERHAPS THE 'MULTIPLE DISCOVERIES' LIST SHOULD ALSO INCLUDE 'MULTIPLE OBSERVATIONS'?
It's not quite the same thing to independently discover something, and to simply notice it at the same time, if the act of noticing would have happened to anyone who was attentively observing at that moment. Or perhaps simultaneous independent observation is the purest form of multiple discovery: The ultimate example of discoveries making themselves known when human intellectual development has arrived at that level at which we are ready to absorb this new addition to our collective body of knowledge.
Here's the first example I've come across, although I'm sure that there are many more:
- Observation of the solar storm of 1859 by British amateur astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson.