---
title: "List of multiple discoveries"
chunk: 2/7
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"
---

1730: Stirling numbers – James Stirling (1730) and Masanobu Saka (1782).
1740s: Platinum – Antonio de Ulloa and Charles Wood (both in the 1740s).
1745: Leyden Jar – Ewald Georg von Kleist (1745) and Pieter van Musschenbroek (1745–46).
1749: Lightning rod – Benjamin Franklin (1749) and Prokop Diviš (1754) (debated: Diviš's apparatus is assumed to have been more effective than Franklin's lightning rods in 1754, but was intended for a different purpose than lightning protection).
1756: Law of conservation of matter – discovered by Mikhail Lomonosov, 1756; and independently by Antoine Lavoisier, 1778.
1773: Oxygen – Carl Wilhelm Scheele (Uppsala, 1773), Joseph Priestley (Wiltshire, 1774). The term was coined by Antoine Lavoisier (1777). Michael Sendivogius (Polish: Michał Sędziwój; 1566–1636) is claimed as an earlier discoverer of oxygen.
1783: Black-hole theory – John Michell, in a 1783 paper in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, wrote: "If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun in the proportion of five hundred to one, and by supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its [mass] with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity." A few years later, a similar idea was suggested independently by Pierre-Simon Laplace.
1798: Malthusian catastrophe – Thomas Robert Malthus (1798), Hong Liangji (1793).
A method for measuring the specific heat of a solid – devised independently by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford; and by Johan Wilcke, who published his discovery first (apparently not later than 1796, when he died).
1799: Complex plane – Geometrical representation of complex numbers was discovered independently by Caspar Wessel (1799), Jean-Robert Argand (1806), John Warren (1828), and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1831).

== 19th century ==