List · Bulleted
Inventors beaten to the patent office
- Elisha Gray, telephone, filed the same day as Bell
- Alfred Russel Wallace, natural selection, sent by post
- Leibniz, calculus, published first and still lost
- Carl Wilhelm Scheele, oxygen, discovered it years before Joseph Priestley but forgot to publish
- Hippolyte Bayard, photography, invented a direct positive process and was beaten to the patent by Louis Daguerre