alt Hacker NewsI think a valid part of the question of who invented something is "who built the first working device" - describing something in theory and building working device are not the same thing.
AG Bell wasn't the first one to conceptually invent the telephone, he was among the first (along with Elisha Gray) in making practical working telephone and later a practical working telephone system.
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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.
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.
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.
"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...