So, who invented the Satellite then? What about the steam engine? The helicopter?

Sometimes the inventors are so far ahead of their time that the materials science first has to catch up (in some cases only a few millenia) before they can realize their devices. Effectively it is then the first person after whoever did the materials science part to create the device that gets to claim the invention.

So we get Sikorski, and not Da Vinci.

We get Arthur C. Clarke who claims the 'communications satellite' even though the moon was there all along and the Sputnik was the first working very crude device (it was one way only, it said 'you lost the space race' in a single bit of message).

We get Newcomen, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (I had to look that up, I can never remember the man's full name), and Hero of Alexandria competing for the steam engine title, with all of them holding some part of the credit.

Pointing at an inventor is hard, and 'who built the first working device' is one way of doing this but it assumes a singular effort whereas most things are team efforts and misses the bit that the idea itself can be an instrumental step in getting your 'true' inventor to make their claim, standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. In isolation, we all probably would invent the hammer in our lifetimes, if that.

"It was able to squeak, but not to speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused to transmit one intelligible sentence." [0]

"A translation of Legat's article on Reis' invention was obtained by Thomas Edison prior to his filing his patent application on a telephone in 1877. In correspondence of 1885, Edison credits Reis as having invented "the first telephone", with the limitation that it was "only musical not articulating"." [1]

Fascinating stuff nonetheless, these inventors and their ideas... See also previous experimenters [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reis_telephone

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis#Previous_e...

To some degree, this is a consequence of the nature of the field you're working in:

* if the physics is so completely understood that you can confidently predict something will work from your sofa, and give an error-free recipe to build it, you indeed can invent from theory... but how deep can this invention be if the problems of the field are completely solved?

* if you are working in a field at the edge of human understanding, you cannot have the confidence in your ideas without having tested them experimentally; a theoretician makes at most a minor contribution to the actual inventions being realized, because he's producing - most likely somewhat wrong - hypotheses.

This latter kind of "theoretical" inventions are heavily subject to survivorship bias. Fifteen competent theoreticians make different predictions - all according to best, though incomplete, model of the world; a successful experiment validates exactly one of them, and we end up exalting the lucky winner as the "inventor".

There's something to be said that mass production is another distinct stage of invention. Karl Benz may have invented the first internal combustion engine car, and plenty more built cars by hand for the rich, but Henry Ford made cars anyone could have for cheap.

That is correct, but the article explicitly addresses this point and argues that the evidence points to Lilienfeld producing a working transistor.

"Later, some people claimed that Lilienfeld did not implement his ideas since "high-purity materials needed to make such devices work were decades away from being ready,"[CHLI] but the 1991 thesis by Bret Crawford offered evidence that "these claims are incorrect."[CRA91] Lilienfeld was an accomplished experimenter, and in 1995, Joel Ross[ROS95] "replicated the prescriptions of the same Lilienfeld patent. He was able to produce devices that remained stable for months."[ARN98] Also, in 1981, semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman confirmed that "Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many occasions".[EMM13]"

For many things (computers, rocketry, aerospace, etc.) and different reasons, Germany in the years around the second world war, was a pretty bad place to get international credit for your accomplishments.

Theodore Maiman and the laser.

I had that thought too, describing that something might be physically possible isn't really inventing it, you have to build (and arguably sell) the device too. Re-organizing someone else's equations and saying it's technically possible is maybe enough to publish a paper but certainly doesn't rise to the standard of inventing in my mind

The only point in asking in the first place is pride and/or greed.

It's a natural extension of the ideas being discussed - the limit in computation per gram of mass has energetic bounds, as well, with configurations nearing the upper limit that start looking more like nuclear explosions than anything we'd regard as structured computation. The extremes are amazing to consider - things that look and act like stars, but are fantastically precise Turing machines, and so on.

It's a theme that sci-fi authors have explored deeply. Accelerando is a particularly fun and worthwhile read if you haven't already!

It seems to refer to the previous paragraph:

> The naive extrapolation of this exponential trend predicts that the 21st century will see cheap computers with a thousand times the raw computational power of all human brains combined

i.e. putting an upper bound on the exponential with solar system mass

Check translate.google.com, for example: the morpheme is overloaded semantically so it's (topically) coincidental.

I see where you're coming from, but while that's the case with most stuff ("normal science") , it often isn't the case for truly revolutionary stuff. Many breakthroughs happen not because of the bulk of the community, but against it, often at the highest cost for the individuals.

This is understandable, but maybe you cannot offer an alternative to just give credit nobody. Schmidhuber is playing the game by its rules being self-consciously contrarian enjoying himself, while offering an interesting historic pinch of retrospective justice.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Giants who are just a bunch of people in a trench coat

  @book{Kuhn1962,
    author    = {Kuhn, Thomas S.},
    title     = {The Structure of Scientific Revolutions},
    publisher = {University of Chicago Press},
    year      = {1962},
    address   = {Chicago},
    note      = {Often cited with various editions, e.g., 50th ed. 2012},
    keywords  = {paradigm shift, normal science, scientific revolutions}
  }

If we’re talking about invention rather than discovery, who created the inflection point between potential and actual use seems relevant if not dispositive.

Wow that is super vitriolic, more if from a colleague. Sure the hehe debate is about if he is to be considered more or less accomplished, but going from non-success to pariah, what is the need?

Was anything he claimed in the article incorrect? Personally, I enjoy these types of historical stories.

I'll just leave this here https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gLnCTgIAAAAJ&hl=en so maybe you realize that's a bit of a tall claim from a random about one of the top researchers in AI, no matter what their opinions are. Perhaps you should look up what a "crank" actually is before labeling researchers, just because they don't match your religion.

He is usually insufferable (and misleading) when he talks about AI innovation priorities. This article is different, though. It really does seem like Lilienfeld invented the transistor first and should be given credit for that. It also really does look like the official inventors knew that and were somewhat dishonest.

Funny, btw, that nobody here has mentioned that Lilienfeld also invented the electrolytic capacitor.

When I ask Gemini and look at the sources it links this article...

If Lillienfeld had working examples, how is Gemini correct that it was the Bell people?