" 

 To reply on what Frank Close actually says: 

 ;Extracts from Chapter 9, The Infinity Puzzle, 2013. Relevant snips underlined, rest is to add context 
 * Although several people discovered the mechanism whereby vector gauge bosons can acquire mass, Brout and Englert being the first to publish a relativistic demonstration, only Higgs drew attention to the consequential existence of a massive scalar particle, which now bears his name. 

 * By the late summer of 1964 they [Guralnik and Hagen] had ""pretty much everything but still had concerns over some fine details."" His former mentor Walter Gilbert was lecturing at a summer school at Lake Como, so Guralnik made a special trip to tell him what they had achieved.... At the very time when Guralnik was talking with Gilbert, Higgs’s paper was already in production. This would become apparent only later... 

 * Unaware of this even more precious jewel that lay just out of their reach, Guralnik and Hagen drafted a manuscript, and showed it to Kibble, asking for any additional input. Fate was about to deal them a cruel blow. During 1964 Britain had had a series of postal strikes, which had delayed the mail. Their memory of events, as described in several accounts,[29] is that as they were about to send the final version of their manuscript to PRL, Kibble came in and announced that in the backlog of mail were ""three papers, one by Robert Brout and François Englert... and two by Peter Higgs."" All three also seemed to have discovered how a gauge boson could become massive.  

 * Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble’s work was tightly argued and contained unique insights toward understanding the depth of these new ideas. However, the sad fact was that they had been scooped. They added references to those papers into the text but changed nothing, nor did they add anything as a result of what had happened. They sent the manuscript to Physical Review Letters, where it was received on October 12, 1964.... By that oversight, they had implicitly placed themselves as runners-up... 

 * Gerald Guralnik was one of those who approached the finishing line early but failed to publish fast enough. 

 * In another of the coincidences in this tale, the editor of PRL received Higgs’s manuscript on the very same day that Brout and Englert’s paper was published. When Higgs’s paper finally appeared in print, on October 19, Brout and Englert were surprised to see that it included a reference to their own: ""He couldn’t have seen our paper, so how did he know of it?"" Higgs explained: Nambu had been the referee of both papers and ""had drawn attention to the work of Brout and Englert. I added a remark about their work."" Their researches were truly independent; in 1964 manuscripts were typed and then submitted by the regular mail. [...] There is no dispute that Brout and Englert were first to complete and first to publish. So why is it that Higgs’s name is associated with the massive boson and not those of Englert or Brout? The answer is that so far everyone has been addressing what happened to Goldstone’s massless boson. However, there remains the issue of Goldstone’s other boson—the massive one. This is what Higgs had uniquely included in his revised paper, the one that appeared in PRL. Two years later, he developed the ideas in a longer paper, setting in motion the events that would make his name. 

 * So it was that Brout, Englert, and Higgs had all published papers, while GHK were writing their own paper, ignorant of developments due to the British postal strike until the fateful moment when Kibble announced the news. 

 * Tom Kibble recalled: ""As a matter of fact [in 1964] the Higgs Boson was not seen by anyone as a particularly important feature. The interest [then] was in the way the gauge vector bosons acquired a mass, eating up the Goldstone [massless] Boson on the way. Now of course it’s important because... its observation would confirm the validity of the theory."" ... Kibble’s perception of the perceived unimportance historically is in accord with the memories of others, which were aired when the six shared the Sakurai Prize in 2010. For Englert and Brout, ""This was our first paper in field theory and we were somewhat isolated. We didn’t know about Glashow’s work [on the SU2 × U1 model of the weak and electromagnetic forces] at all."" 

 * During the International Conference on High Energy Physics at Berkeley in 1966, Ben Lee prominently referred to the “Higgs Boson” and the “Higgs Mechanism.” ... As the GHK team, including Hagen, had not completed their paper until after the appearance of Higgs’s original papers, and as Higgs had built on this further during 1966, with a study of how