It takes a collective to raise an idea

You may know about Alan Turing or John von Neumann, but what about John Vincent Atanasoff or Konrad Zuse?

According to Wikipedia:

> John Vincent Atanasoff (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer. Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College (now known as Iowa State University).

and

> The original ABC was eventually dismantled in 1948, when the university converted the basement to classrooms, and all of its pieces except for one memory drum were discarded.

Also according to Wikipedia:

> The Z1 was a motor-driven mechanical computer designed by German inventor Konrad Zuse from 1936 to 1937, which he built in his parents' home from 1936 to 1938. It was a binary, electrically driven, mechanical calculator, with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched celluloid film.

> The “Z1” was the first freely programmable computer in the world that used Boolean logic and binary floating-point numbers; however, it was unreliable in operation.It was completed in 1938 and financed completely by private funds. This computer was destroyed in the bombardment of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II, together with all construction plans.

I did know about Zuse, maybe because I studied a semester in a German university, maybe because I like (computing) history, but I didn't know about Atanasoff and it got me thinking.

Why don't we know more about them, why aren't they mentioned more, why weren't their ideas the basis for subsequent work?

And the first answer that got to my mind is the title of this post: It takes a collective to raise an idea.

Atanasoff was working almost alone in Iowa, Zuse was working alone in his parents' home.

If you follow the history of the field in many instances a "light bulb moment" happens when the "main character" is talking to someone else that happens to work on the next cubicle, next room or they happen to share lunch or a walk, the other person either provides a different perspective, some insight or relation to their line of work or an introduction to someone that may have a solution to some problem.

Not only that, but by being in a collective increases the chances of people taking the whole idea or a part of it and continuing the work after the "main character" stops working on it, not only the work is important, but the memory of the work being done.

Or maybe it's something else :)