Success Has Many Fathers - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 35

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Success Has Many fathers
early concepts for Satellite Navigation

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as
well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.

Edmund Burke, letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 1777

Controversies over priority in scientific ideas are common. There was debate
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over the role of Sir Isaac Newton
versus Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in inventing calculus. Newton invented it
first, but his aversion to publishing resulted in Leibnitz inventing it indepen-
dently later and Leibnitz's notations proved to be more useful in practice. It
became a partisan issue, with the English asserting Newton's priority and Ger-
mans asserting Leibnitz's. There was a controversy in the nineteenth century
about the roles of British astronomer John Couch Adams and French astrono-
mer Urbain Le Verrier in discovering Neptune. There was also the controversy
in the latter part of the nineteenth century over who invented the telephone,
especially between Elisha Gray and Alexander G. Bell. There were suggestions
in the twentieth century that Rosalind Franklin's role in discovering dna's struc-
ture, for which James Watson and Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize, was over-
looked because she was a woman. Note, though, that her early death made her