> but this is really one of these stories were a bunch of people invented the same thing very closely to each other due to a precipitating reaching of understanding.
This is by far the dominant case of invention. Truly independent work is incredibly rare.
The thing that's a little different about Tesla in the US at least, is he is so incredibly fetishized by eg high-profile idiots: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla,
or conspiracy nutjobs like the International Tesla Institute (http://teslatech.info/ttevents/prgframe.htmhttp://tesla.org/tesla_fair_abq.htm) publishing and promoting Tesla related conspiracies and hawking investments in snake-oil technology like Rand Cam engines, VMSK, and all manner of "over-unity" machines
Actually at first I thought idiot was a bit harsh.. but then I reread what I had forgotten about that post - I think if he's juvenile to promote the vandalism of wikipedia over a completely fantastical, out of context reinterpretation of history to label Thomas Edison a "douchebag", well then it is fair to label him an idiot on a limited forum.
Also, there's no accounting for taste but I find even his non-serious comics puerile and not terribly funny - pretty much one step above Taboola chum, or Jim Davis for millenials. Most of the "humor" and overplayed hook is simply describing everyday things with odd adjectives, ie hair cave=vagina, saliva=evil mouth juice, wow. There's probably a term for this trope.. Anyway, it gets clicks on Facebook.
20 years is a long time. For some fields, it is perfectly reasonable, but 20 year patents on many recent CS inventions would have significantly bottlenecked development of the industry - Look at how much mess was created by the JPEG patents, for example, and similar problems have existed for every other not-explicitly-libre A/V codec.
While we're on the subject of patents and Nvidia, their patent on using quasi Monte Carlo in rendering is allowing them to hold basically the whole path tracing world hostage, e.g. possibly forcing people to use CUDA who might otherwise have used OpenCL.
They didn't even invent the numerical methods themselves (pure mathematics from other countries from long ago), they were just first to file for a particular application.
There's a strong adverse selection effect, though. Because you need to publish to be granted a patent but can sue whenever anyone infringes (whether willful or not), the incentive is to patent obvious approaches that don't work well and hold the best approach that you're actually using as a trade secret. That way, anyone attempting to replicate you likely ends up in a patent minefield, yet you don't give away the keys to the castle in a patent where you have to detect infringement yourself.
I believe a few years is 20 years though. I haven't thought of patents from this perspective but 20 years is still a long time (and large chunk of your working years) to benefit from something.
This is by far the dominant case of invention. Truly independent work is incredibly rare.