Celebrated Scientists and Intellectual Heists
By: Babatunde Adeleke
Tags: People, Facts, Inventor, Women In Tech, Science

It has always been said that the victors always end up writing history, if you have had any reason to doubt that saying, I must tell you that it is nothing but the truth. For a lot of us, somethings are rote knowledge. We know that Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin and that Graham Bell was the father of the telephone. We might not even remember where we read it but we know that we know these things.

What if I tell you that we may have been scammed, me, you, all of us? It will be a shocker to find out that some of the most revered bright minds actually took on Intellectual heists. This piece will aim to shed light on a few instances. Ironically, we start from the object of light itself — the light bulb.

The Light Bulb

Thomas Edison is said to be the man who invented the light bulb and there is even a myth that he tried 999 times before he got it right the one thousandth time. He was not the only one toying with the idea at that time, however, there were others including Jean Focault, Humphrey Davy, Joseph Swan, J.W. Starr. Joseph Swan won a patent lawsuit against Thomas Edison and several historians believe that Heinrich Goebel was actually the first person to have invented the light bulb in 1854. He tried to sell his invention to Edison, who refused it, but later bought Goebel’s patent for the light bulb after his death. The history of the light bulb is polarized and many believe that Thomas Edison was given lone inventor status because of convenience.

The theory of relativity

Albert Einstein is revered for being the father of the theory of relativity. How can you be called the father of something you never birthed? At best, Albert Einstein added to the body of knowledge in the field. in all actuality, Henri Poincare was the expert on the theory of relativity and most likely the one with whom the idea originated. In fact, Poincare published 30 books and more than 500 essays on the theory of relativity before Einstein ever came along. There are several other researchers whose works Einstein built on and passed off as his. Scholars passed it off that perhaps, Einstein was not so familiar with the works of Poincare and his associates. Einstein became the father of relativity by successfully not citing Poincare as the source of his ideas.

A tale of the Alexander’s

The name penicillin is synonymous with Alexander Fleming, Alexander Graham Bell is the father of the telephone too. There is a common thread to both stories beyond the name . They both took credit for what someone else found. If anything at all, they only built on the case. Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone was a story of patent and the loopholes it used to have in the past. According to historical records, Antonio Meucci, an Italian inventor, actually invented the first telephone in 1860, but he called his invention the “teletrofono.” Although Meucci filed a temporary patent on his idea, he failed to renew his patent. Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham Bell grabbed hold of the idea, obtained a patent, and subsequently is now known as the inventor of the telephone.

Alexander Fleming in his own case picked up on the idea by Ernest Duchesne, cure typhoid in guinea pigs. Even when Fleming later picked up on the idea of penicillin and worked with it, he stopped working on it and moved on while other scientists eventually mastered it and found a way to mass-produce it.

Nuclear Fission

The story of the intellectual heist of nuclear fission is one that was orchestrated by greed and polished by sexism. Lise Meitner was a student under the legendary physicist Max Plank, and the first German woman to hold a professorship at a German University. As the Nazis rose to power, the young Jewish scientist was forced to flee her home country. She continued to correspond with her research partner, Otto Hahn, from her new location in Scandinavia. In 1938, Hahn and Meitner joined forces to outline the concept of nuclear fission. This was the groundbreaking moment that would, in just five years, give rise to the awesome destructive capacity of the atomic bomb. Hahn chose to omit his partner’s name and was thus the sole recipient of the 1944 prize in chemistry from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Calculus

Another revered academic that has engaged in knowledge heist is the renowned Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton is regarded as the father of calculus. Is he? Gottfried Leibniz believes that he was supposed to be given that right given that he published his findings first. The matter became a serious argument, and it was tabled before the Royal Society of Scientists, of which Newton was president. You know how the case ended.

Newton’s supporters accused Leibniz of plagiarizing Newton’s unpublished ideas.

Leibniz died in disfavor in 1716. Newton himself claimed to have begun working on a form of calculus (which he called “the method of fluxions and fluents”) in 1666, at the age of 23 but did not publish it except as a minor annotation in the back of one of his publications decades later. Gottfried Leibniz began working on his variant of calculus in 1674, and in 1684 published his first paper employing it, Newton published in 1687.

When next you are working on something really important, do not joke with a patent.

History is a set of lies agreed upon, there again it has unfolded. If all these were kept out of the books for convenience sake, who knows what else has been kept out too? Don’t think too much about it!

A merry Christmas to you all.