5 Discoveries & Inventions Incorrectly Credited to the Wrong People (#129)

Since history began, humans have made many astonishing discoveries or invented things that have changed the world from that point onwards. But unfortunately, these important discoveries and inventions are not always credited to the right people.

One of the earliest examples of this is the discovery of the heliocentric universe in 1543 (officially published by Nicolaus Copernicus), which is a cosmological model that explains how the Sun is assumed to lie at or near a central point (for example, of the solar system or of the universe) while the Earth and other bodies revolve around it.

While Copernicus and his Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs were the driving force in bringing heliocentrism into the mainstream of Renaissance thought, his work was really a re-establishment of the theory rather than a completely new proposition.

A century before Copernicus published his book, 1400s German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa was arguing for the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. And even way before him, in the 2nd century BCE, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. And he wasn't alone—other Greek philosophers before him also speculated that the Earth was revolving around a mystical fire all the way back in the 5th century BCE.

So, this very early example of a theory that was still being presented as new in the 1500s despite also being around for centuries, proves that sometimes “new discoveries” are actually built on many layers of previous theories and discoveries.

Sometimes, this might simply be because as time goes on, people are able to do more conclusive research to expand what once was just a thought or a proposal of an idea, and they can turn it into fully formed theory — something more concrete, more definite.

However, there are times when the person being incorrectly credited with a discovery is done out of greed, stealing, sexism, or other reasons. So in this episode, I’m going to talk about some of the biggest discoveries and inventions throughout history that have been incorrectly attributed to the wrong people.

(Unfortunately, you’ll notice a trend in that most of these stories are about men taking the credit for women’s work. I didn’t intend on this being a feminist episode, but as with most things do when we’re talking about history and science, sexism has always existed, so it’s unintentionally ended up that way!)

Computer Programming

I’m going to start with someone I’ve talked about before in my Women of Science episode (#57): Ada Lovelace. The daughter of Lord Byron, Lovelace was steered towards maths by her mother, who feared her daughter would follow in her father’s “mad, bad, and dangerous” literary footsteps. 

When Lovelace was barely 20, she started collaborating with inventor Charles Babbage at the University of London on his “Analytical Engine,” an early model of a computer. In 1843, she added extensive notes of her own to a paper about this machine, detailing how the Engine could be fed step-by-step instructions to solve complicated maths problems, and trained to work not only with numbers but also words and symbols “to compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

The notes are considered the first descriptions of what we now call algorithms and computer programming, and for decades, historians have argued over whether Lovelace came up with them herself, or Babbage was the real author. Many of her achievements have been erased from history in favour of attributing them to men of the time. Historians believe her manic depression meant she didn’t realise or stand up for the extent of her own talents at the time, but Babbage’s own memoir even suggests she deserved credit for “the algebraic working out of the different problems.”

More recently, Lovelace has been honoured with, among other things, a British medal of honour, a tunnel boring machine in London, and her own annual celebration. In 2011, the Ada Initiative was founded to help promote women in computer science and open-source technology. So at least she’s finally getting the credit she so rightly deserves!

Theory of Evolution

In around 500 BCE, a Greek philosopher, Anaximander of Miletus, speculated that humans must have descended from another species whose offspring could survive without assistance. He reasoned that those ancestors must be fish because fish hatch from eggs and begin living on their own without the aid of their parents. Thus, he proposed that all life started in the sea.

Even though we can now trace human evolutionary lineage back to fish, Anaximander’s speculation was only partially true because it was not a theory in the scientific sense of the word, meaning that it could have not been rigorously tested through observations and experiments to determine whether the idea is correct or not.

Throughout history, various philosophers and scientists have proposed aspects of what would later become an evolutionary theory of life on Earth.

Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, formulated one of the first formal theories of evolution in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794). While he didn’t propose natural selection, he did discuss ideas that his grandson expanded on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor, resulting in “one living filament.” He was interested in knowing how one species could evolve into another.

Like many other theories, and as I mentioned at the beginning, Charles Darwin simply brought something new to the old philosophy—a plausible mechanism called “natural selection.” (Now I’m singing the Horrible Histories song.) According to natural selection, organisms produce more offspring than can survive in their environment. Those who are physically better equipped to survive, mature, and reproduce do so successfully. Those who lack such fitness, on the other hand, either don’t reach reproductive age or produce fewer offspring than their counterparts.

So although Charles Darwin is widely known for discovering the theory of evolution — really, a lot of the credit has to go to his grandad, Erasmus, for laying down most of the groundwork.

DNA Double Helix

In the 1950s, 33-year-old Rosalind Franklin, a physical chemist working in the biophysics unit of King's College in London, had honed a technique to closely observe molecules using X-ray diffraction. She was the first to capture a photographic image of DNA (known as Photo 51). She wrote in her notebooks that the structure of DNA had two chains.

But a famed article in Nature magazine by James Watson and Francis Crick would be the first to outline the discovery of the DNA double-helix structure. It went on to win them a Nobel Prize, but the article buries a mere mention of Rosalind Franklin’s role in the footnotes. How did this happen?

Two weeks after Franklin captured her photograph, an estranged male colleague of Franklin’s at King’s College showed her work to competitors Watson and Crick, without her permission. Photo 51 became crucial in shaping their thesis, but it would take Watson 40 years to admit this publicly. Franklin didn’t even know that they had seen either her X-ray photograph showing unmistakable evidence of the helix structure, or her detailed notes.

Unfortunately, Franklin died from cancer just a few years later, in 1958 at the age of 37, four years before Watson and Crick received their Nobel Prize that they probably only got because of her work.

In Watson’s 1968 bestselling book The Double Helix, written all about their discovery, he candidly wrote: “Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realised they were in our hands.” Other comments and chauvinistic phrases dismissive of “Rosy” in Watson's book caught the attention of the emerging women's movement in the late 1960s, and launched the legend Franklin as a feminist heroine.

There is, however, no evidence that Franklin felt bitter about their achievement or had any sense of having been outrun in a race that nobody but Watson and Crick knew was a race. She accepted the Watson–Crick model as a hypothesis only. She wrote in September 1953 that “discrepancies prevent us from accepting it in detail”. She ended up leaving King's College, where she said spent 2 miserable years (but would end up posthumously having a building there named after her), and in the years before she died she published 17 academic papers. She died proud of her world reputation in the research of coals, carbons and viruses.

Today, she is seen by many as a genius whose gifts were sacrificed to the greater glory of the male, and her failure to win the Nobel prize has been given as a prime example of the entrenched misogyny within the field of science.

Iguanodon

Now let’s talk about one of my favourite dinosaurs: the Iguanodon! In 1787, a time when dinosaurs were far from common human knowledge, a man—barely mentioned today—found a gigantic thigh bone.

When the bone was presented before Dr. Caspar Wistar, he didn’t really see the significance and tossed it aside, unknowingly missing the chance to seal the deal on discovering dinosaurs. Unfortunately for Wistar, this bone became one of the most extraordinary lost-and-found items of all time.

It wasn’t until 8 years later, in 1795, that rising star of palaeontology Georges Cuvier amazed others by arranging a whole load of bones into shapely creatures. This piqued the interest of other researchers, including Dr Gideon Mantell, whose wife Mary Anne Mantell had found a collection of fossilised teeth embedded in some rocks on the side of a road in Sussex. Gideon, also an amateur palaeontologist, studied the teeth. To try and determine what they belonged to, he reached out to experts for advice, including the previously mentioned Georges Cuvier, sometimes referred to as the father of palaeontology.

At first, Cuvier initially thought that the teeth could be from a fish, but he noted that the fossils' internal structure was different, and that they may instead be from a new animal - possibly an herbivorous reptile. Until that time, no evidence of giant prehistoric reptilian herbivores had been discovered.

Encouraged by Cuvier's suggestion, Gideon visited a museum in London to search for jaws and teeth of living reptiles. He had little success until he was shown an iguana skeleton. The fossilised teeth resembled those of the iguana, only much larger. Iguanas are relatively large lizards, but scaled up the prehistoric owner of the fossilised teeth could have been up to 18 metres or longer. Gideon based the name Iguanodon on this link to iguanas.

Mantell prepared a paper to be delivered to the Royal Society only to be crushed by his friend, Reverend William Buckland, who told him to slow down. Buckland, a geologist, swooped in and presented his written work on the Megalosaurus to the Geological Society of London and earned the first published description of a dinosaur, beating Mantell to the post. But Mantell didn’t give up his research, doing everything he could to try and discover more pieces of the Iguanodon.

At this point, science itself was in the throes of a great change. A battle was being waged between the religious and scientific theories of evolution. On the religious side stood a group of eminent scientists – among them Richard Owen. Owen was a figure of high society, a friend of the royal family, and had helped establish the Natural History Museum in London. But he had never been an ardent collector of fossils. His obsession was “trying to prove that dinosaurs were part of God’s creation – God’s monsters – rather than our ancestors” — and he was apparently pretty good at convincing people.

Owen heard about Mantell’s Iguanodon discovery, and set about discrediting his research in support of the aristocratic and conservative wings of science. He used his influence to re-classify the fossils as “God-created beasts”, but crucially, at the same time, coined the name “dinosaur” to describe them, making him a big name in history for coining the word. Naming them “dinosaurs” brought these beasts to the collective imagination—but it was Owen who got all the credit, rather than Mantell.

In 1853, 21 prominent scientists met to discuss the unfinished Iguanodon. However, the man who found and identified the Iguanodon in the first place wasn’t among them. The person at the head of the table was Richard Owen.

Owen began erasing Mantell’s contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had identified years earlier and claiming credit for their discovery. Mantell persisted in conducting new research, but Owen’s power at the Royal Society ensured that the majority of his publications were rejected. (It seems like he was like a Professor Lockhart of the scientific world, making a career out of other people’s discoveries and achievements.)

Sadly, Mantell committed suicide in 1852, unable to take any more suffering or persecution. Soon after Mantell’s death, a very uncharitable obituary appeared in the Literary Gazette. Mantell was depicted as a mediocre anatomist whose small contributions to palaeontology were hampered by a “lack of precise understanding.” Cuvier and Owen, among others, were credited with discovering the Iguanodon.

I guess what makes this even worse is that we hear about the story of Gideon Mantell having all the credit taken away from him, but when we think back to the beginning of all this — and I don’t want to put a feminist spin on literally everything, but it has to be mentioned — Gideon’s wife was Mary was potentially the person who actually discovered the Iguanodon teeth in the first place, and was an avid ameteur palaentologist in her own right, so she’s another woman forgotten in favour of men who take the credit!

Monopoly

One night in 1932, a Philadelphia businessman named Charles Todd and his wife, Olive, introduced their friends Charles and Esther Darrow to a real-estate board game they had recently learned. As the two couples sat around the board, enthusiastically rolling the dice, buying up properties and moving their tokens around, the Todds were pleased to note that the Darrows liked the game. In fact, they were so taken with it that Charles Todd made them a set of their own, and began teaching them some of the more advanced rules. The game didn’t have an official name: it wasn’t sold in a box, but passed from friend to friend. But everybody called it ‘the monopoly game’.

One day, Darrow asked Todd for a written copy of the rules. Todd was slightly perplexed, as he had never written them up. Nor did it appear that written rules existed elsewhere. In fact, the rules to the game had been invented in Washington DC in 1903 by a bold, progressive woman named Elizabeth Magie. But her place in the game’s history was lost for decades and credited to the man who had picked it up at his friend’s house: Charles Darrow.

Today, we know the story of Elizabeth Magie, the actual creator of the global hit Monopoly. But even so, the Charles Darrow myth still persists as an inspirational parable of American innovation, thanks to Monopoly’s publisher and the man himself. After he sold a version of the game to Parker Brothers and it became a phenomenal success, eventually making him millions, journalists asked him how he had managed to invent Monopoly out of thin air.

So how did the game come to be in the first place, before Darrow took all the credit and made millions? It all comes back to Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie. At the turn of the century, income inequalities were so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman stood a chance at easing society’s problems with something as trivial as a board game — but she was determined to try.

Night after night, Lizzie sat in her home working on her board game. She wanted it to reflect her progressive political views – that was the whole point of it. At this time Lizzie was unmarried, which was unusual for a woman of her age. (She eventually married at 44.) Even more unusual was the fact that she was the head of her household. Completely on her own, she had saved up for and bought her home, along with several acres of property.

She was also intensely political, teaching classes about her political beliefs in the evenings after work. But she wasn’t reaching enough people. She needed a new medium – something more interactive and creative. Board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes, and inventors were discovering that the games were not just a fun way to pass the time but also a means of communication — and so Lizzie set to work.

She began speaking in public about a new concept of hers, which she called the Landlord’s Game. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” she wrote in a political magazine. “It contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, i.e. the accumulation of wealth.”

Lizzie’s game featured play money and deeds and properties that could be bought and sold. Players borrowed money, either from the bank or from each other, and they had to pay taxes. And it featured a path that allowed players to circle the board – in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and also included on the board were three words that are still on the board more than a century after Lizzie wrote them there: GO TO JAIL.

Lizzie drew nine rectangular spaces along the edges of the board between each set of corners. In the centre of each nine-space grouping was a railroad, with spaces for rent or sale on either side. Absolute Necessity rectangles offered goods like bread and shelter, and Franchise spaces offered services such as water and light. As gamers made their way around the board, they performed labour and earned wages. Players who ran out of money were sent to the Poor House. Players who trespassed on land were sent to Jail, where they had to serve out their time or pay a $50 fine. Serving out their time meant, as it still does today, waiting until they threw a double on the dice.

After years of tinkering, Lizzie entered the US Patent Office in March 1903 to secure her legal claim to the Landlord’s Game. At least two years later, she published a version of the game through the Economic Game Company, a New York–based firm that counted Lizzie as a part-owner. The game became popular with leftwing intellectuals and on college campuses, and that popularity spread throughout the next three decades; it eventually caught on with a community of Quakers in Atlantic City, who customised it with the names of local neighbourhoods, and from there it found its way to Charles Darrow, and we circle back to the beginning of this story, where we unfortunately know what happens next.

In total, the game that Darrow brought to Parker Brothers has now sold hundreds of millions copies worldwide, and he received royalties throughout his life. Lizzie was paid by Parker Brothers, too. When the game started to take off in the mid-1930s, the company bought up the rights to other related games to preserve its territory. For the patent to the Landlord’s Game and two other game ideas, Lizzie reportedly received $500 — and no royalties.

At first, Lizzie didn’t suspect the true motives for the purchase of her game. When a prototype of Parker Brothers’ version of the Landlord’s Game arrived at her home, she was delighted. Eventually, though, the truth dawned on her – and she became publicly angry, hurt, and in search of revenge against a company that she felt had stolen her now bestselling idea. Parker Brothers might have the rights to her 1924-patented Landlord’s Game, but they didn’t tell the story of her game’s invention dating back to 1904 or that the game had been in the public domain for decades. She had invented the game, and she could prove it.

Stories in the Evening Star and the Washington Post started telling the truth about where the game actually came from, but it was to little avail. As the Parker Brothers’ version of her game continued to grow, the other games Lizzie invented faded into obscurity, as did Lizzie herself. She died in 1948, a widow with no children, whose obituary and headstone made no mention of her game invention. One of her last jobs was at the US Office of Education, where her colleagues knew her only as an elderly typist who talked about inventing games.

As Charles Darrow reaped the rewards of the game’s success, Lizzie’s role in the invention of Monopoly remained obscure. But in 1973, Ralph Anspach, a leftwing academic who was under legal attack from Parker Brothers over his creation of an Anti-Monopoly game, learned her story as he researched his case, seeking to undermine the company’s hold on the intellectual property. The case lasted a decade, but Anspach prevailed, bringing Lizzie’s story into public knowledge.

But Hasbro, the company of which Parker Brothers is now a subsidiary, still downplays Magie’s status, stating: “Hasbro credits the official Monopoly game produced and played today to Charles Darrow.” On Hasbro’s website, a timeline of the game’s history begins in 1935, rather than decades previously when Lizzie actually invented it. Roughly 40 years have passed since the truth about Monopoly began to appear publicly, yet the Darrow myth persists as an inspirational parable of American innovation.

Stories like these make you wonder how many other buried histories are still out there, particularly of women who have had their accomplishments overshadowed by men, working class people who are overshadowed by the wealthy, or non-white people’s achievements being buried by the crushing power of white privilege. Unfortunately it’s always happened and it will continue to happen, but I guess now in the age of the internet, it’s slightly easier for these people’s stories to become known and to find out the truth.