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How Common Is Multiple Invention?

When Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone on February 14th, 1876, he beat competing telephone developer Elisha Gray to the patent office by just a few hours.

So Ostwald’s ammonia synthesis efforts based on using high pressure and metal catalysts count as a multiple because the concept was in the correct ballpark, even though he ultimately failed. Often these were discoveries of new important physical phenomena (the photovoltaic effect, electrical induction, X-rays) that Wikipedia included on the list of historic inventions. But I was still surprised that over 50% of inventions in the time period looked at had some type of multiple effort to create, and that nearly 40% weren’t simply someone having the idea or working on the problem, but successes or near-successes.

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