It’s pretty common that “breakthrough inventions” are arrived-at pretty much simultaneously by apparently disparate sources at approximately the same moment in time.

Consider the telephone, which is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in most of the world and to Antonio Meucci in my native Italy. Or radio, which is broadly attributed to Marconi or Tesla. In hindsight it seems like one person triumphed upon others, but really if you look at it from their point of view they work with urgency and secrecy because they perceive themselves to be in neck-to-neck competition with their cohorts. They perceive their technological environ very differently from how we do ex post facto.