From my understanding of the history of science and other major disciplines, the discoveries and developments of major breakthroughs are either done by continuous build-ups of multiple groups of people that continued the work of certain studies for multiple generations, or the work was done by a team of people who collaborated with one another for a common interest; or at times, the discoveries were stolen and the credit was given to someone else.

Even in scientific journals that we see today, these are mostly done by multiple people instead of one or two and are products of multiply repeated studies to test whether they produced the same results.

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Stories like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla where it was believed that Edison was the sole creator of multiple inventions but after a deep understanding of the Current War, most of his so-called inventions were stolen from others or were given credit to him including the infamous case of Topsy the Elephant. However, at the same time, Tesla is somewhat credited with the "unheard genius" trope and given credit for multiple inventions and discoveries as suggested by this famous comic. However, according to some historians, this is not the case

This is similar to the claimed story of how Watson and Crick stole Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the DNA

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A similar story is that of Einstein - either he is overly advertised and romanticised and became an icon of science but this is possible because he existed in a time where television was starting to become more common and popular which may explain why he became so famous, and there are some shocking history about the man as well and made errors in his findings which shows that he is just as human as everyone else.

And apparently, while Einstein's theories were ground-breaking, there were not quote "new" per se, but rather inspired by or developed from the works of others such as Hume and other physicists like Planck, Bohm, and Grossman

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Or maybe something as recent as Steve Jobs whose contributions helped the democratisation of personal computers and his ideas made computers more popular. He is often credited as a visionary, an inventor and as a born leader but was actually quite the opposite and overly critical and there are claims that his ideas were stolen from others similar to how Jobs lied to Steve Wozniak about the bet that he had about creating an Atari game but lied about how much he was owed.

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So there is a certain pattern of "Good artists copy, great artists steal" where scientific and technological achievements are given credit to a few select few but in reality, are done by many other people who are not given credit for.

So why is this the case?