page_title: List of multiple discoveries
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: List of multiple discoveries / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: J. W. Gibbs Español: J. W. Gibbs Русский: Дж. У. Гиббс
context_page_description: Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. "Sometimes," writes Merton, "the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."
  Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall; the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
  Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to such famous historic instances. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.
context_section_description: 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.
  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).
  Cadmium – Friedrich Strohmeyer, K.S.L Hermann (both in 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.
  Beryllium – Friedrich Wöhler, A.A.B. Bussy (1828).
  Electromagnetic induction was discovered by Michael Faraday in England in 1831, and independently about the same time by Joseph Henry in the U.S.
  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.
  Non-Euclidean geometry (hyperbolic geometry) – Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1830), János Bolyai (1832); preceded by Gauss (unpublished result) c. 1805.
  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.
  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.
  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.
  The Möbius strip was discovered independently by the German astronomer–mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius and the German mathematician Johann Benedict Listing in 1858.
  Theory of evolution by natural selection – Charles Darwin (discovery about 1840), Alfred Russel Wallace (discovery about 1857–58) – joint publication, 1859.
  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.
  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, the same day, filed patents for discovery of the telephone.
  1877:  Charles Cros described the principles of the phonograph that was, independently, constructed the following year (1878) by Thomas Edison.
  British physicist-chemist Joseph Swan independently developed an incandescent light bulb at the same time as American inventor Thomas 
caption: Gibbs
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