---
title: "List of multiple discoveries"
chunk: 5/7
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"
---

It was originally proved in 1934 by Aleksandr Gelfond, and again independently in 1935 by Theodor Schneider. 1934: The Penrose triangle, also known as the "tribar", is an impossible object. It was first created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934. The mathematician Roger Penrose independently devised and popularized it in the 1950s. 1936: In computer science, the concept of the "universal computing machine" (now generally called the "Turing Machine") was proposed by Alan Turing, but also independently by Emil Post, both in 1936. Similar approaches, also aiming to cover the concept of universal computing, were introduced by S.C. Kleene, Rózsa Péter, and Alonzo Church that same year. Also in 1936, Konrad Zuse tried to build a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programability; however, Zuse's machine was never fully functional. The later Atanasoff–Berry Computer ("ABC"), designed by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, was the first fully electronic digital computing device; while not programmable, it pioneered important elements of modern computing, including binary arithmetic and electronic switching elements, though its special-purpose nature and lack of a changeable, stored program distinguish it from modern computers. 1938: Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, was discovered in 1881 by Simon Newcomb and rediscovered in 1938 by Frank Benford. Newcomb's discovery was named after its rediscoverer, Benford, making it an example of Stigler's law of eponymy (named by Stephen Stigler after himself in 1980: see below). The atom bomb was independently thought of by Leó Szilárd, Józef Rotblat and others. 1939: The jet engine, independently invented by Hans von Ohain (1939), Secondo Campini (1940) and Frank Whittle (1941) and used in working aircraft. 1941: In agriculture, the ability of synthetic auxins 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and MCPA to act as hormone herbicides was discovered independently by four groups in the United States and Great Britain: William G. Templeman and coworkers (1941); Philip Nutman, Gerard Thornton, and Juda Quastel (1942); Franklin Jones (1942); and Ezra Kraus, John W. Mitchell, and Charles L. Hamner (1943). All four groups were subject to various aspects of wartime secrecy, and the exact order of discovery is a matter of some debate. 1947: The point-contact transistor was independently invented in 1947 by Americans William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working at Bell Labs, and in 1948 by German physicists Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, working at the Compagnie des Freins et Signaux, a Westinghouse subsidiary located in Paris. The Americans were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". 1949: A formal definition of cliques in graph theory was simultaneously introduced by Luce and Perry (1949) and Festinger (1949). Late 1940s: NMR spectroscopy was independently developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the Purcell group at Harvard University and the Bloch group at Stanford University. Edward Mills Purcell and Felix Bloch shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries. 1950: Polio vaccine (1950–63): Hilary Koprowski, Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin. 1952: The maser, a precursor to the laser, was described by Russian scientists in 1952, and built independently by scientists at Columbia University in 1953. The laser itself was developed independently by Gordon Gould at Columbia University and by researchers at Bell Labs, and by the Russian scientist Aleksandr Prokhorov. 1958: The integrated circuit was devised independently by Jack Kilby in 1958 and half a year later by Robert Noyce. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. Late 1950s: The QR algorithm for calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices was developed independently in the late 1950s by John G. F. Francis and by Vera N. Kublanovskaya. The algorithm is considered one of the most important developments in numerical linear algebra of the 20th century. 1960s: Kolmogorov complexity, also known as "Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity", descriptive complexity, etc., of an object such as a piece of text is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object. The concept was independently introduced by Ray Solomonoff, Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin in the 1960s. Early 1960s: The concept of packet switching, a communications method in which discrete blocks of data (packets) are routed between nodes over data links, was first explored by Paul Baran in the early 1960s, and then independently a few years later by Donald Davies. Early 1960s: The principles of atomic layer deposition, a thin-film growth method that in the 2000s contributed to the continuation of semiconductor-device scaling in accord with Moore's law, were independently discovered in the early 1960s by the Soviet scientists Valentin Aleskovsky and Stanislav Koltsov and in 1974 by the Finnish inventor Tuomo Suntola. Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is a popular model in finance for trading off risk versus return. Three separate authors published it in academic journals and a fourth circulated unpublished papers. 1963: In a major advance in the development of plate tectonics theory, the Vine–Matthews–Morley hypothesis was independently proposed by Lawrence Morley, and by Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews, linking seafloor spreading and the symmetric "zebra pattern" of magnetic reversals in the basalt rocks on either side of mid-ocean ridges. Cosmic microwave background as a signature of the Big Bang was confirmed by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs. Penzias and Wilson had been testing a very sensitive microwave detector when they noticed that their equipment was picking up a strange noise that was independent of the orientation (direction) of their instrument. At first they thought the noise was generated due to pigeon droppings in the detector, but even after they removed the droppings the noise was still detected. Meanwhile, at nearby Princeton University two physicists, Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles, were working on a suggestion of George Gamow's that the early universe had been hot and dense; they believed its hot glow could still be detected but would be so red-shifted that it would manifest as microwaves. When Penzias and Wilson learned about this, they realized that they had already detected the red-shifted microwaves and (to the disappointment of Dicke and Peebles) were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. 1963: Conductive polymers: Between 1963 and 1977, doped and oxidized highly conductive polyacetylene derivatives were independently discovered, "lost", and then rediscovered at least four times. The last rediscovery won the 2000 Nobel prize in Chemistry, for the "discovery and development of conductive polymers". This was without reference to the previous discoveries. 1964: The relativistic model for the Higgs mechanism was developed by three independent groups: Robert Brout and François Englert; Peter Higgs; and Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble. Slightly later, in 1965, it was also proposed by Soviet undergraduate students Alexander Migdal and Alexander Markovich Polyakov. The existence of the "Higgs boson" was finally confirmed in 2012; Higgs and Englert were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2013. 1965: The Cocke–Younger–Kasami algorithm was independently discovered three times: by T. Kasami (1965), by Daniel H. Younger (1967), and by John Cocke and Jacob T. Schwartz (1970). The Wagner–Fischer algorithm, in computer science, was discovered and published at least six times.