Edward Hope Kirkby They are buried together at Waverley Cemetery. So ended a life of invention largely unrecognised as biographers of George Taylor and Archibald Shaw claimed all the credit for them for Kirkby’s endeavours. Edward Hope Kirkby was a jeweler watchmaker in Williamstown who eventually became a manufacturing electrician making systems of fire protection, in 1908 he invented and patented the first automatic sprinkler alarm. He is first recorded as experimenting with X-ray in September 1896 This is only 9 months after Roentgen presented his discovery of X-rays. He is reported as experimenting with the medical staff at Williamstown Hospital later that
Multiple discovery independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton"—a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together. As Merton said, "Sometimes the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before." Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A.