Examples include Hubble's law, which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble; the Pythagorean theorem, which was known to Babylonian mathematicians before Pythagoras; and Halley's Comet, which was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC (although its official designation is due to the first ever mathematical prediction of such astronomical phenomenon in the sky, not to its discovery).
There is a similar quote attributed to Mark Twain:It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.
[4] Similar arguments were made in regards to accepted ideas relative to the state of science by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Merton notes: This pattern of recognition, skewed in favor of the established scientist, appears principally (i) in cases of collaboration and
Kennedy observed that "it is perhaps interesting to note that this is probably a rare instance of a law whose statement confirms its own validity".