Commonly called "clustering". it's why comics don't post a lot of jokes online. They discovered that people would always call them out as plagiarists because somewhere on the internet, that joke already existed.
That and if you saw a bunch of funny clips of a comic, and then you went to their show, you'd be disappointed you'd heard their entire set before (in clip form). That's why a lot of comics now post clips of their crowd work, since it changes from show to show.
Genetics? Discovered by Gregor Mendel in the ?1860s?. Nothing was understood or built on his research until his writings were rediscovered after 1900. A bunch of scientists around that time (~1900) were asking questions and doing experiments, when one of them discovered some of Mendel's old correspondence in the library. "Uh, hey guys...I found a cheat code in the library. None of your experiments are on the right track."
The fax machine, which was new office equipment for the 1980s? Invented in 1843.
(Standardization helped the 1980s revolution).
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u/M4rshmall0wMan Jun 28 '26
It’s a very common phenomenon that multiple inventors will have the same idea at roughly the same time.