Have you ever had that moment in which you wonder if some tool or invention exists and when you look into it you’re disappointed to discover someone else thought of it first? Or worse, you have an idea that doesn’t exist, and it takes forever for someone to make it a reality? That sort of thing has been happening for ages and not just in the world of inventions. Even scientific ideas can be thought up by someone at one point but it takes someone else entirely to actually prove it and make it a real thing. And sometimes the distance between someone thinking of an idea and then someone proving it was true or feasible can be years.
10. Black Holes Were Proposed back in 1783
Everyone knows what a black hole is these days, at least the basic idea of them. The concept is still pretty mind-blowing, however, and many of the fundamentals are very confusing to a layman even with some of the science readily at hand. How can someone be so powerful light can’t escape it? Where do the things sucked into a black hole go? Can it ever get full?
Science can answer some of these questions and many others today, while a lot of the nature of black holes remains a mystery. This is all even more fascinating when you consider that the idea of a black hole was first proposed all the way back in 1783 by John Mitchell, a parson and scientist from England.
Mitchell proposed the idea of a star that had such immense gravity even light would be unable to escape it. His science wasn’t all fully sound, but the concept was on the money. It wasn’t until 1971, nearly 200 years later, when the first actual black hole was identified, giving proof to Mitchell’s idea.
9. Muslim Doctors Beat Louis Pasteur to Germ Theory by 500 Years
If there’s one thing people in the modern age are acutely aware of, it’s germs. Whether you still mask up when you go out in public or not, we all know that viruses and bacteria are out there and avoiding them can keep us healthy.
Most people credit Louis Pasteur with germ theory as a result of his experiments in the 1860s that showed bacteria led to food spoilage. And while being the father of germs isn’t that great of a title in some cases, it seems to have done well for him.
Now if we travel back a considerable amount of time to 1369 and thereabouts, a man named Lisan al-din Ibn Al-Khatib, often just referred to as Ibn Al-Khatib, and another named Ab? Ja‘far A?mad Ibn ‘Ali ibn Muhammad Ibn Kh?tima Al-An??r?, known as Ibn Khatima proposed the idea that disease, and specifically the plague, were caused by microorganisms.
Khatima said that “minute bodies” enter the human body and lead to disease but it would b hundreds of years before his theory was proved to be accurate and science was able to show that these minute bodies, invisible to the naked eye, were real things.
8. The Naked Mole Rat Was Predicted Before it Was Officially Discovered
Theories relating to equations or scientific processes are one thing when it comes to science but how often do you hear about the existence of an entire life form being predicted before that life form is formally discovered? That’s what happened with the naked mole rat.
In the 1970s, entomologist Richard Alexander predicted the existence of the mole rats based on what he already knew of the eusocial structure of insect colonies, like termites or bees which have one queen and many subordinate members of the colony. He predicted that if such a mammal were to exist, it would have to be subterranean and exist in an easily expandable nest near food. This meant it would likely be a rodent since few other mammals live underground. It would likely eat roots and tubers because there wouldn’t be enough grubs and insects for a colony.
He predicted the animal would have to live in Africa for the climate and the soil to offer the greatest benefit for such a creature by preventing predators from reaching them while offering the most likelihood of food to sustain such a species.
It was while Alexander was giving a lecture in 1978 that someone familiar with mole rats was present and, while not familiar with their social structures, suggested that was what Alexander was describing. And, as it happened, his concept of their eusocial society was correct. He had predicted them almost exactly.
7. Arthur C. Clarke Predicted Comms Satellites Years Before They Existed
Satellites are ubiquitous these days and, as of 2022, there are 4,852 of them in orbit around our planet that do everything from transmitting cell phone and GPS signals to spying and tracking weather. That’s a long way from Sputnik, the first satellite ever launched into space back in 1957. In 1962 Telstar was launched, the first communications satellite. Its purpose was to test if satellites could even be used to set up a communications network around the world. But just two years later, in 1964, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke predicted that not only would it work but that we would be able to have instant contact with others anywhere in the world, even if we didn’t know where they were. This is, of course, a fairly accurate description of how the internet and cell phones have connected the world.
Now sure, that’s a little impressive given that he said it when satellites were in their infancy, but that wasn’t his first bite at the apple. Back in 1945 had already proposed that artificial satellites could be used to transmit information to earth faster and cheaper than using traditional wired communications.
6. Neptune was Discovered Mathematically Before Anyone Saw it With a Telescope
As a kid in school you may have been tempted to question the usefulness of certain lessons, particularly those taught in math class. “When are we ever going to use this in real life?” is a common refrain among those who don’t enjoy the lessons. But never forget that an entire planet in our solar system was discovered not with telescopes or satellites but with pure math.
The planet Uranus was discovered in 1781 but it was observed to have an unusual orbit. John Couch Adams and Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier were able to use math to deduce that there had to be another planet out there altering the orbit of Uranus and predicted not only that it existed but where it had to be and how much mass it had. Using their calculations, Johann Gottfried Galle saw Neptune for the first time in 1846.
5. Darwin Predicted Spiders “Ballooning” on Earth’s Electrical Field
The internet loves a quirky animal story and, in fact, will recycle the same ones every few years. For instance, the story of how some spider species can fly on electrical fields. They call it ballooning and you can read about it every few years.
The science was proven by scientists in Bristol in the year 2018, but it was actually Charles Darwin who first came up with the idea based on observations he made back in 1832. At the time, he was 60 miles from shore on a ship and noticed that thousands of tiny spiders had somehow invaded. His theory was that they had flown there, somehow, using their webs.
The reality is that spiders will climb to a high point and point their rear ends skyward. They release lines of silk into the air and the fine threads ride the electric field of the earth itself. The long-standing theory that they relied on wind was disproven as it even occurs when there is no wind at all, and wind can’t account for the speed and manner in which it occurs, anyway.
4. Computer Viruses Were Theorized in the 1940s
Few things are more annoying than getting a virus on your computer after visiting some totally innocent websites that you didn’t delete from your history at all. The first virus to infect a computer was called the Creeper, and it was a test to see if a malicious program could, in fact, replicate and spread. And it could! But the Creeper also politely removed itself from computers as it spread. That was 1971. Three years later, the Rabbit virus spread and was made with malicious intent. Arguably this was the first true virus.
But the origins of viruses in the theoretical sense go back much further, all the way to 1949. That was when John von Neumann theorized such a thing could be possible. His work was just like a thought experiment presenting the idea.
3. Atomic Theory Dates Back to Greek Philosophy
In 1955, Erwin Mueller invented a microscope that, for the first time in history, allowed humans to see actual atoms. Given the state of atomic theory at the time, this was remarkable. The atom had already been split prior to this, but no one had actually seen one before. And even more remarkable was how far back in the past you have to go to get to the original.
Ancient Greek philosophers had devised the idea of atoms from a fairly simple observation. You could cut anything in half. Then cut that thing in half. And so on and so on. So all things were made of smaller things and the idea was that, eventually, you’d hit the smallest thing. The atom. The uncuttable.
Democritus came up with the idea of atoms in the 5th century and, remarkably, a lot of his theories have turned out to be fairly sound. Atoms were unique to the material they made up, they move about in a void and sometimes clung together and changes in how they arranged themselves made for changes in matter. He may not have known all the fundamentals, but given the time period his assumptions were incredibly astute.
2. Greek Philosopher Anaxagoras Correctly Figured Out How Eclipses Work
Few things in nature are as impressive as an eclipse but it wasn’t really until the advent of modern astronomy that we were fully able to see and understand what happens during one. There was a time in the distant past when ancient civilizations believed everything from dragons to fearsome deities were responsible for the eclipses.
Long before anyone understood the science, Greek philosopher Anaxagoras proposed a radical idea. What if the moon was passing in front of the sun? This was 2500 years ago, at a time when both the moon and the sun were deities, mind you, and definitely not a ball of flaming gas and a rock that orbited our world. The idea was essentially heretical.
Anaxagoras was committed to the idea that the moon was a rock. He even described mountains on it. But when the prevailing belief was that the moon was actually a god, his more scientific approach resulted in him being arrested and ultimately exiled from Greece. That was actually a lenient result, since his theories had initially gotten him a death sentence.
1. Islamic Thinkers Theorized Evolution Centuries Before Darwin
Charles Darwin will forever be synonymous with evolution and natural selection but it should be remembered that the man didn’t come up with these ideas in a vacuum. He made some important observations, but his work came after a lot of other work that spanned back centuries.
It was 1837 when Darwin’s famous work took root. Literally 1,000 years earlier, Al-Jahiz theorized natural selection, adaptation and environmental factors as the sources of differences between species. He observed that animals struggled to survive, and those that were strongest, or fittest, would succeed. And Al-Jahiz was just one of many scholars who had similar ideas hundreds of years before Darwin came on the scene.
It’s generally believed Darwin did not plagiarize these thinkers and, in fact, would have never even heard of them. But it does go to show that ideas can be discovered independently and that sometimes being credited with a discovery is as much luck as it is skill.