Historical Speculation

The third verse of a popular Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate.

This comes between some very poetic reflections about the grandeur and variety of the natural world. To me, it is something of a stain on an otherwise lovely piece of music - but far more importantly, it spells out the mindset of the people who wrote it. They clearly believed in determinism to a degree which I can’t quite wrap my head around. It certainly clashes with the rags-to-riches, self-made man ethos of capitalist/free market thinking.

Karl Benz, generally acknowledged as the inventor of the gasoline engine, got his patent just ahead of the Daimler/Maybach team who made a nearly identical discovery, totally independent of Benz’s work. Similarly, Alexander Graham Bell won his “race to patent office” just ahead of several competitors, some of whom appear to have offered viable equivalents to Bell’s design. How could multiple people make such world changing discoveries almost simultaneously? I imagine it has something to do with the general state of the field; the prior knowledge at hand and what breakthroughs immediately preceded advent of the newest technology; after all, everyone would be looking at same research. Is this really the case, or is there simply such a thing as “an idea whose time has come?”. That being, are some inventions simply demanded by society, and the idea itself dictates the path of multiple creators?