---
title: "List of multiple discoveries"
chunk: 3/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:44:22.470419+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

1805: In a treatise written in 1805 and published in 1866, Carl Friedrich Gauss describes an efficient algorithm to compute the discrete Fourier transform. James W. Cooley and John W. Tukey reinvented a similar algorithm in 1965.
1817: Cadmium – Friedrich Strohmeyer, K.S.L Hermann (both in 1817).
1817: Grotthuss–Draper law (aka the Principle of Photochemical Activation) – first proposed in 1817 by Theodor Grotthuss, then independently, in 1842, by John William Draper. The law states that only that light which is absorbed by a system can bring about a photochemical change.
1825: Bromine discovered by Carl Jacob Löwig; and independently, in 1826, by Antoine Jérôme Balard.
1828: Beryllium – Friedrich Wöhler, A.A.B. Bussy (1828).
1830: Non-Euclidean geometry (hyperbolic geometry) – Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1830), János Bolyai (1832); preceded by Gauss (unpublished result) c. 1805.
1831: Electromagnetic induction was discovered by Michael Faraday in England in 1831, and independently about the same time by Joseph Henry in the U.S.
1831: Chloroform – Samuel Guthrie in the United States (July 1831), and a few months later Eugène Soubeiran (France) and Justus von Liebig (Germany), all of them using variations of the haloform reaction.
Dandelin–Gräffe method, aka Lobachevsky method – an algorithm for finding multiple roots of a polynomial, developed independently by Germinal Pierre Dandelin, Karl Heinrich Gräffe, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky.
1837: Electrical telegraph – Charles Wheatstone (England, 1837), Samuel F.B. Morse (United States, 1837).
First law of thermodynamics – In the late 19th century, various scientists independently stated that energy and matter are persistent, although this was later to be disregarded under subatomic conditions. Hess's law (Germain Hess), Julius Robert von Mayer, and James Joule were some of the first.
1846: Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, studying Uranus's orbit, independently proved that another, farther planet must exist. Neptune was found at the predicted moment and position.
1851: Bessemer Process – The process of removing impurities from steel on an industrial level using oxidation, developed in 1851 by American William Kelly and independently developed and patented in 1855 by eponymous Englishman Sir Henry Bessemer.
1858: The Möbius strip was discovered independently by the German astronomer–mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius and the German mathematician Johann Benedict Listing in 1858.
1858: Theory of evolution by natural selection – Charles Darwin (discovery about 1840), Alfred Russel Wallace (discovery about 1857–58) – papers published concurrently, 1858.
1862: 109P/Swift–Tuttle, the comet generating the Perseid meteor shower, was independently discovered by Lewis Swift on 16 July 1862, and by Horace Parnell Tuttle on 19 July 1862. The comet made a return appearance in 1992, when it was rediscovered by Japanese astronomer Tsuruhiko Kiuchi.
1868: French astronomer Pierre Janssen and English astronomer Norman Lockyer independently discovered evidence in the solar spectrum for a new element that Lockyer named "helium". (The formal discovery of the element was made in 1895 by two Swedish chemists, Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langlet, who found helium emanating from the uranium ore cleveite.)
1869: Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev published his periodic table of chemical elements, and the following year (1870) Julius Lothar Meyer published his independently constructed version.
1873: Bolesław Prus propounded a "law of combination" describing the making of discoveries and inventions: "Any new discovery or invention is a combination of earlier discoveries and inventions, or rests on them."
1876: Oskar Hertwig and Hermann Fol independently described the entry of sperm into the egg and the subsequent fusion of the egg and sperm nuclei to form a single new nucleus.
1876: Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell independently, on the same day, filed patents for invention of the telephone.
1877: Charles Cros described the principles of the phonograph that was, independently, constructed the following year (1878) by Thomas Edison.
1877: In England, Edward Sharpey-Schafer reported to the Royal Society his discovery of what eventually came to be called the nerve synapse; the Royal Society was skeptical of the unconventional notion of such spaces separating individual neurons, and asked him to withdraw his report. In 1888, in Spain, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, having used the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi's technique for staining nerve cells, published his discovery of the nerve synapse, which in 1889 finally gained acceptance and won Ramón y Cajal recognition as an, alongside Golgi – many say, the – "founder of modern neuroscience".
1879: British physicist-chemist Joseph Swan independently developed an incandescent light bulb at the same time as American inventor Thomas Edison was independently working on his incandescent light bulb. Swan's first successful electric light bulb and Edison's electric light bulb were both patented in 1879.
Circa 1880: the integraph was invented independently by the British physicist Sir Charles Vernon Boys and by the Polish mathematician, inventor, and electrical engineer Bruno Abakanowicz. Abakanowicz's design was produced by the Swiss firm Coradi of Zurich.
1886: The Hall–Héroult process for inexpensively producing aluminum was independently discovered by the American engineer-inventor Charles Martin Hall and the French scientist Paul Héroult.
In 1895 the Russian linguist Filipp Fortunatov, and in 1896 the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, independently formulated the sound law now known as the Fortunatov–de Saussure law.
1895: Adrenaline was discovered by the Polish physiologist Napoleon Cybulski. It was independently discovered in 1900 by the Japanese chemist Jōkichi Takamine and his assistant Keizo Uenaka.
1896: Two proofs of the prime number theorem (the asymptotic law of the distribution of prime numbers) were obtained independently by Jacques Hadamard and Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and appeared the same year.
1896: Radioactivity was discovered independently by Henri Becquerel and Silvanus Thompson.
1898: Thorium radioactivity was discovered independently by Gerhard Carl Schmidt and Marie Curie.
Vector calculus was invented independently by the American, Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903), and by the Englishman, Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925).

== 20th century ==