Science: Who Discovered What?

> Edison did not invent the electric lamp (an Englishman named Sir Joseph Swan produced an incandescent lamp in 1860—19 years before Edison).*

> Charles Darwin did not originate the theory of evolution (it was evolved long before him by his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the Frenchman Jean Lamarck, Greek philosophers).

> The U.S. doctors George H. Whipple, George R. Minot and William P. Murphy, who got the Nobel Prize in 1934 for their liver cure for anemia, did not invent the cure (it was discovered some 20 years earlier by two Italians, Pietro Castellino and Alfonso Pirera).

These and other subversive facts are reported, in the interest of international friendship, by a free-lance writer named T. Swann Harding in a recent issue of the American Journal of Pharmacy. Following the unoriginal theory that nations are partisan toward their own heroes, Harding found that most science textbooks and their readers are full of such national misconceptions. “Laymen,” says Harding, “customarily hear of the last fellow who put it [the discovery] across. . . .” Some Harding findings:

Oxygen’s discoverer is supposed by most English-speaking people to have been Britain’s Joseph Priestley, who identified the gas in 1774. But France’s Antoine Lavoisier observed the chemical properties of “air,” which he later named oxygen, in 1772. Germans credit the discovery to Karl Scheele, who found oxygen independently in the same year as Priestley.

Smallpox Vaccine is usually credited to the English country doctor Edward Jenner, who first used it in 1796. But it had been discovered nearly a hundred years before by a Greek named Timoni.

The Cell Theory (that cells are the basic units of living matter) is commonly supposed to have been formulated first by the German Theodor Schwann in 1839. Actually it had been advanced nearly 200 years earlier, by British Botanist Robert Hooke, and many others preceded Schwann.

*The Swan Mazda is still produced and sold in Britain.