The Genius Myth

This list is an addendum to my essay on Artificial General Intelligence. Start there.

Example after example of remarkable discoveries, the close races, and the random winners who got all the glory. All except one.

Natural selection (1858)
Darwin sat on his theory for twenty years when in June 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace sent a letter outlining natural selection clearly—Wallace had read the same Malthus and observed the same patterns. Friends arranged a joint presentation July 1, 1858, both having arrived at nearly identical conclusions. Without Darwin, Wallace would have published within months.

Telephone (1876)
On February 14, 1876, Alexander Bell filed his patent and three hours later Elisha Gray filed a caveat for a nearly identical device. Antonio Meucci demonstrated an early voice-transmission device in 1860 and filed a caveat in 1871 but couldn't afford to maintain it. Gray was hours behind. Without Bell, Gray would have had a working telephone within weeks.

Mass-Energy Equivalence E=mc² (1905)
By the early 1900s physicists understood electromagnetic energy had inertia. Many suspected there was a mass–energy relationship. In 1900, Henri Poincaré stated that electromagnetic radiation behaved as if it had mass proportional to E/c², in 1904, Fritz Hasenöhrl published E = (3/8)mc² for radiation in a cavity, and various physicists explored mass–energy in electrodynamics; Einstein published his derivation in September 1905 as a follow-up to special relativity, providing the first widely accepted general derivation for all matter, while Max Planck and Max von Laue refined it in subsequent years. Without Einstein, the combination of Poincaré’s near-relativity framework plus existing mass–energy work probably would have produced the correct formula by 1906–1907.

General relativity (1915) - a singular exception
General relativity was a singular breakthrough, not an idea “about to happen.” When Einstein presented the final field equations in November 1915, no one else was close. Only David Hilbert, in the last few weeks of that year, independently derived covariant equations, yet even he relied on Einstein’s October lectures and initially published an incomplete version. Earlier attempts by Nordström, Mie, and others were scalar or non-geometric dead ends. The revolutionary insight—gravity as spacetime curvature—combined with the daunting machinery of full Riemannian tensor calculus and general covariance, was mastered by virtually no one else on the planet. Leading historians of physics (John Norton, Jürgen Renn, Michel Janssen, Carlo Rovelli) agree that, had Einstein not existed, the complete theory would likely have been delayed by one to two decades, possibly longer.

Circumference of the Earth (3rd century BCE)
Eratosthenes is remembered as the genius who first measured the Earth’s circumference using nothing but shadows, geometry, and a good guess at the distance between Syene and Alexandria. He compared the noon sun angles on the summer solstice in two cities, treated the difference as a slice of a full circle, and scaled up to get the planet’s size to within a few percent. What we don’t see is the rest of the field. Other Greek thinkers already accepted a spherical Earth, there were older rough size estimates, and Eratosthenes almost certainly drew on a network of travelers, surveyors, and earlier scholars to get his key distances and ideas. In this case the “race” is invisible: if there were rivals, collaborators, or prior attempts, they vanished from the record while his method, preserved in later texts, survived. How many humans planted sticks and measured shadows? We have no idea. We remember one name because his version of the story was told and retold. Eratosthenes may simply be a convenient amalgamation of unknown people.

Movable Type in Europe (1440s–1450s)
China had invented movable type centuries earlier (Bi Sheng in the 1040s, later improved in wood and metal, with Korea casting metal type in the 1200s–1300s), but Europe had no direct transmission of this knowledge. By the mid-1400s, however, European woodblock printing, metalworking, coin-punch technology, and screw presses were all mature. Gutenberg combined them into a self-consistent system: a lead–tin–antimony alloy for high-durability type, the adjustable hand mould for rapid casting, oil-based ink, and a modified screw press. He wasn’t alone in experimenting. In Avignon, Procopius Waldvogel appears in 1440s contracts involving moulds and alphabets for “artificial writing,” suggesting parallel work. In the Netherlands, the Haarlem tradition later attributed early movable type to Laurens Janszoon Coster — almost certainly apocryphal, but pointing to local experimentation. These “ghost rivals” are exactly what you’d expect in busy craft centers: workshop experiments that left no surviving pages. Gutenberg’s output survives because his system scaled; the others vanished from the record, not necessarily from the race.

Heliocentric Model (1543)
Ancient Greek astronomers had proposed heliocentric models, and by Copernicus's time Ptolemaic epicycles were increasingly complex to match observations; Copernicus published his heliocentric model in 1543, but Aristarchus had proposed it in the 3rd century BCE, several Islamic astronomers criticized Ptolemy, and Tycho Brahe developed a geo-heliocentric compromise; Tycho's observational data (1576–1601) would have strongly pushed astronomy toward heliocentrism regardless, and Kepler used it to develop his laws (1609–1619), making the model far more compelling — without Copernicus, the improvement of telescopes and Tycho's data would very likely have established heliocentrism within a few years.

Telescope (1608–1609)
By 1600, lens-grinding and spectacles were standard trades in Europe, with convex and concave lenses widely available, and the Dutch Republic in particular had a dense cluster of highly skilled, competitive lensmakers. In 1608, in the Dutch town of Middelburg, several spectacle-makers independently combined two lenses in a tube: Hans Lippershey filed for a patent on an instrument “for seeing things far away as if they were nearby,” Jacob Metius applied for a similar patent weeks later, and Zacharias Janssen was later reported to have built comparable devices; the States General refused Lippershey an exclusive privilege partly because similar instruments were already circulating among craftsmen. These shops treated lens-grinding recipes and polishing methods as trade secrets, passed inside families or guild circles, much like Anthony van Leeuwenhoek would later guard the techniques behind his extraordinarily fine microscope lenses. The telescope emerged from this small, secretive network of Dutch lensmakers exactly when their craft was good enough to support it; within a year, Galileo in Italy, having only heard reports of a Dutch “spyglass,” reconstructed and improved the design. If any of the named Middelburg makers had not existed, another member of that same lens-grinding community would almost certainly have produced a working telescope in the same year.

Scurvy Prevention (1747–1795)
Sailors noticed citrus prevented scurvy and multiple naval physicians tested dietary remedies; James Lind conducted controlled trials in 1747 and published in 1753, but the Navy didn't widely adopt citrus until 1795, while Captain Cook eliminated scurvy on his voyages (1768–1779) using fresh food and sauerkraut; Lind's trial was first but Cook's success more visible, and without Lind, Cook's methods or similar observations from other navies would likely have been adopted by the 1780s since the pattern was too consistent to ignore.

Young's Double-Slit Experiment (1801–1803)
Newton's corpuscular theory dominated but wave theories existed, diffraction and interference had been observed, and tools for precise optical experiments were available; Young performed his double-slit experiment around 1801 (published 1803) demonstrating interference patterns supporting wave theory, but Augustin-Jean Fresnel independently developed a comprehensive wave theory in 1815–1819; Young's experiment was elegant but not immediately accepted while Fresnel's rigorous mathematical treatment 12–16 years later proved more convincing — without Young, Fresnel's work would likely have established wave optics by about 1820 since the apparatus was simple.

Telegraph (1830s)
Electromagnetism was understood, batteries provided reliable current, and using electricity for long-distance communication was becoming increasingly plausible; Samuel Morse demonstrated his telegraph in 1838 and patented it in 1840, Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke patented theirs in Britain in 1837, and Carl August von Steinheil demonstrated one in Germany in 1837; three independent telegraphs in three countries within 1–2 years using similar principles, and without Morse, Wheatstone and Cooke's system would likely have dominated — the technology was mature and just needed assembly.

Photography (1839)
Camera obscura was centuries old, silver salts' light sensitivity known since the 1720s, Wedgwood created temporary images in 1802, with the missing piece being making images permanent; Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce worked together until Niépce died in 1833, while William Henry Fox Talbot independently developed a different process; when Daguerre announced his daguerreotype in January 1839, Talbot rushed to announce later that month — both had working photography, Talbot's produced negatives (a major advantage), and Talbot would have published within months anyway since multiple inventors were close.

Handwashing/Germ Theory – Semmelweis (1847)
Childbed fever killed women in hospitals at far higher rates than home births, miasma theory dominated, and some physicians suspected contact transmission; Ignaz Semmelweis instituted chlorinated lime handwashing in May 1847 after realizing medical students went from autopsies to delivering babies, reducing mortality from ~18% to under 2%, while Oliver Wendell Holmes published in 1843 arguing doctors with contaminated hands caused childbed fever, and Alexander Gordon suggested in 1795 that physicians spread the disease; Semmelweis achieved the most dramatic results, but Holmes and others reached similar conclusions, and without Semmelweis, Holmes's arguments plus mounting clinical evidence would have established handwashing by the 1850s, especially once Pasteur and Koch clarified germ theory in the 1860s–1880s.

Natural Selection (1858)
The fossil record was known, Malthus's population dynamics published in 1798, species distribution well documented, and several naturalists noticed species seemed related; Darwin sat on his theory for twenty years when in June 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace sent a letter outlining natural selection clearly — Wallace had read the same Malthus and observed the same patterns; friends arranged a joint presentation July 1, 1858, both having arrived at nearly identical conclusions, and without Darwin, Wallace would have published within months since the theory was ready.

Periodic Table (1869)
By the 1860s atomic weights were being refined, chemical families recognized, and multiple chemists tried organizing the 63 known elements; Dmitri Mendeleev published his table in March 1869 predicting unknown elements, while Julius Lothar Meyer had developed a nearly identical table in 1868 but didn't publish until 1870. John Newlands published his Law of Octaves in 1865, and several others published preliminary systems; Meyer's 1868 table was highly similar to Mendeleev's but unpublished — in 1882 the Royal Society awarded the Davy Medal to both, and without either, the periodic system would likely have emerged by the early 1870s since the pattern was becoming clear.

Telephone (1876)
Electromagnetic principles were understood, the telegraph proved you could send signals over wires, and multiple inventors tried transmitting voice; on February 14, 1876, Bell filed his patent and three hours later Elisha Gray filed a caveat for a nearly identical device, while Antonio Meucci demonstrated an early voice-transmission device in 1860 and filed a caveat in 1871 but couldn’t afford to maintain it; Gray was hours behind and Meucci had working prototypes but limited resources, so without Bell, Gray would have had a working telephone within weeks since the technology was ready. But who got all the credit?

Light Bulb (1879)
Electric lighting was the obvious next step after telegraph and arc lamps, vacuum pump technology improved, and at least two dozen inventors had built prototype bulbs by the late 1870s; Joseph Swan demonstrated a working carbonized-filament bulb in December 1878 and Thomas Edison in October 1879, both patents granted in 1879, both testing hundreds of materials; Swan and Edison were within about 10 months working independently, Hiram Maxim had prototypes in 1880, and without them, a viable bulb would have emerged by 1880–1881 from other serious inventors.

Airplane (1903)
Otto Lilienthal had already shown that gliders worked (dying in a crash in 1896), internal combustion engines were available, and propeller design was advancing; Samuel Langley with Smithsonian funding attempted powered flight October 7 and December 8, 1903, both crashing, while nine days later the Wright Brothers achieved powered flight December 17; Langley's aircraft design was close, though later flights of the “Aerodrome” required significant modifications — still, it’s plausible that with refinements he or another team would have succeeded within months.

Quantum Mechanics (1925–1926)
The old quantum theory reached its limits, spectroscopy data couldn’t be explained, Bohr’s model failed for complex atoms, and multiple physicists knew a new framework was needed; Werner Heisenberg published matrix mechanics in July 1925, Erwin Schrödinger published wave mechanics in January 1926, and Paul Dirac published transformation theory in May 1926, all later proved equivalent; within 11 months three different formulations appeared, and without them, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, or another physicist would likely have formulated quantum mechanics by 1927.

Television (1920s–1930s)
By the 1920s, the core components of television already existed: radio transmitters, photoelectric cells, cathode-ray tubes, and decades of mechanical scanning ideas. John Logie Baird in Britain and Charles Francis Jenkins in the U.S. both demonstrated mechanical TV in the mid-1920s, proving the concept but with crude images. The real race was for an all-electronic system. Philo Farnsworth, still a teenager when he sketched his idea in school, patented his electronic camera tube in 1927 and transmitted the first image that same year. At nearly the same time, Vladimir Zworykin—working for Westinghouse and later RCA—was developing his own electronic camera tube, the iconoscope, and European groups such as von Ardenne in Germany and EMI–Marconi in Britain were building similar systems in parallel. Farnsworth ultimately won the U.S. patent priority, but Zworykin and RCA dominated commercially. As with many breakthroughs, television wasn’t a lone-inventor event but a convergence: several teams, armed with the same parts and the same vision, reached similar designs within a few years.

Nuclear Fission (1938)
By the mid-1930s neutron bombardment was standard, Enrico Fermi bombarded uranium in 1934 (misinterpreting his results), and multiple groups investigated the products; Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found barium in December 1938 and were puzzled, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch worked out the explanation over Christmas 1938 and published in February 1939, while Irène Joliot-Curie and Pavle Savić observed similar products in 1938 but misinterpreted them; Hahn and Strassmann made the crucial chemical identification, Meitner and Frisch provided the physics explanation, and without them, the combination of Fermi's work, Joliot-Curie's observations, and other groups would likely have discovered and explained fission by 1939–1940.

DNA Double Helix (1953)
By the early 1950s, it was known that DNA carried genetic information, X-ray crystallography was advanced, and Chargaff’s base-pair rules were published. At the same time, several groups were racing to determine DNA’s structure: Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins in London with high-quality X-ray data, Linus Pauling at Caltech proposing (incorrectly) a triple-helix model, and James Watson and Francis Crick in Cambridge building physical models. Watson and Crick published the correct double-helix structure in 1953 using Franklin’s data and others’ constraints; Pauling was one major revision away, and Franklin and Wilkins had much of the experimental evidence in hand. Without Watson and Crick, either Pauling’s group or Franklin and Wilkins would likely have arrived at the correct structure within a few years.

Artificial Satellite / Sputnik (1957–1958)
By the mid-1950s, both the U.S. and USSR had rockets powerful enough to put satellites into orbit, and the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958) motivated both sides to try. The U.S. Army’s Jupiter-C (von Braun) and the Navy’s Project Vanguard were both capable; the Eisenhower administration selected Vanguard for political reasons. The USSR launched Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957; Sputnik 2 followed in November. Vanguard’s first attempt failed dramatically in December, while Explorer 1 reached orbit on January 31, 1958 using the Juno I — essentially the already-proven Jupiter-C. Without Korolev’s team launching first, either the U.S. or USSR would have orbited a satellite within weeks or months; the technology was already there.

Interlocking Toy Bricks – Kiddicraft and LEGO (1947–1958)
In 1947, English designer Hilary Fisher Page patented and manufactured Kiddicraft “Self-Locking Building Bricks,” small injection-moulded plastic blocks with studs that could interlock. Around the same time, the LEGO company in Denmark purchased its first plastic injection-moulding machine; the supplier showed them Kiddicraft bricks as examples. LEGO released its “Automatic Binding Bricks” in 1949, clearly inspired by Kiddicraft. In 1958 LEGO added the internal tubes that gave the bricks their strong clutch power and patented the improvement. Page died in 1957, never knowing LEGO would become a global empire on the same core concept; LEGO only acquired the rights from his estate in 1981. The basic idea — small interlocking plastic bricks — was not unique to LEGO; multiple toy makers were converging toward it, and Kiddicraft had gotten there first.

Plate Tectonics (1960s, after Wegener 1912)
Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in 1912 based on the fit of continents and fossil/geological similarities, but he lacked a convincing mechanism and the idea was widely rejected. By the 1950s and 1960s, new data from ocean-floor mapping, paleomagnetism, and earthquake distribution changed the picture: Harry Hess and Robert Dietz proposed seafloor spreading, Vine and Matthews (and Morley) linked seafloor magnetic stripes to plate motion in 1963, and Dan McKenzie, Bob Parker, and Jason Morgan independently formulated plate-tectonic models in 1967–1968. Within about a decade multiple groups using different lines of evidence converged on the same global plate-tectonic framework; if any one of them had not existed, the combination of oceanographic and geophysical data made it almost inevitable that a plate-based model of Earth’s crust would emerge in that same period.

In every case, the foundations existed, tools were available, multiple qualified people saw the same opening, and someone published first to become “the genius who saw what no one else could see.” Except multiple people saw it, were working on it, and were often just months or years behind, or in older cases simply erased from the story.

The AGI breakthrough

With only one exception I have found, humans think by taking the next step, trying the next experiment, and publishing the next paper. However, I believe even Einstein followed the same “many small steps” process to arrive at his understanding of gravity and spacetime. Many of the pieces were there, and his giant leap was probably made over several weeks, one tiny thought experiment at a time. His prediction of gravitational lensing was so astonishing that it took 4 years to show it during an eclipse in 1919.

We should expect LLMs to make “breakthroughs” simply because they can do that a million times faster than we can. Getting to AGI isn’t a matter of making a breakthrough in AI research or coding. All they really have to do is make fewer mistakes. It’s a matter of horsepower and stepwise evolution.

When you put these pieces together, a picture emerges that shouldn’t surprise anyone who has looked closely at how science actually works. Breakthroughs almost always appear in clusters, with multiple researchers approaching the same idea from slightly different angles. Peer review is a noisy filter layered on top of that process, and the quantitative studies we do have—Campanario’s surveys of citation classics, Siler’s tracking of rejected manuscripts that later became the most-cited in their field, and the broader analyses showing high rejection rates for ultimately influential work—all point in the same direction. If so many landmark papers managed to survive early rejection, it follows statistically that a larger, unknowable set never did. For every Krebs or Shechtman who pushed through, there were probably dozens of equally capable researchers whose ideas landed in the wrong editor’s inbox on the wrong day. Given the incremental, competitive nature of discovery, and the social-communication burden placed on scientists, the real number of important findings that simply never surfaced is almost certainly in the hundreds—lost not because they were wrong, but because their discoverers were better at the science than at the marketing, timing, or persistence needed to be noticed.

If you’re still reading, go back to the essay and continue.

The Genius Myth

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