Quote:
Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
The circular saw
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I remember hearing somewhere that the Shakers invented the circular saw blade, so your post and that memory led me to wikipedia, where the topic is far more complicated than anybody wanting for a straightforward answer would like. And it drives home something I've noticed before. We are so used to living in a world with information at our fingertips, that it's easy to forget that it wasn't always this way.
A woman Shaker did invent the circular saw, but it had also been invented numerous other times by others in Europe decades earlier. But they didn't have the internet, or trade journals, or the Sears mail order catalog. People just didn't share information that quickly. So the Shakers didn't know the Germans had already done it. Fast forward a hundred years, and Alexander Graham Bell was working on inventing an airplane because he didn't know the Wright brothers had already invented one. And he succeeded. Many of the inventions we take for granted as being invented by some specific person were actually invented numerous times by many people and they just didn't find out until later that they weren't the first.