Who Was ‘First’ with a Big Idea? It’s Often Hard To Know

Thanks to the phenomenon of “multiples”

Clive Thompson
Marker
Published in
7 min readDec 22, 2021

--

Guglielmo Marconi invented radio in the 1890s — but so did Nikola Tesla and several others. (Photo by Nicolas Buffler)

I recently wrote about the history of “pinch and zoom” — and how Apple didn’t really invent it. Apple executives love to claim they did; Steve Jobs even stood on stage and boasted “boy, have we patented it!”

--

--

Clive Thompson
Marker
Writer for

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net