Lemley's "The Myth of the Sole Inventor" (2012) documents the canonical lone-genius invention story as false, with near-simultaneous independent invention as the textbook norm

Mark A. Lemley's "The Myth of the Sole Inventor" (Michigan Law Review 110, 2012; SSRN working paper 2011) opens by naming the canonical American invention stories — Edison and the light bulb, Bell and the telephone, the Wright brothers and the airplane — the kind "any elementary-school student can recite." Lemley's stated position: "The canonical story of the lone genius inventor is largely a myth." His documented corrections: Edison "found a bamboo fiber that worked better as a filament in the light bulb developed by Sawyer and Man, who in turn built on lighting work done by others"; Bell "filed for his telephone patent on the very same day as an independent inventor, Elisha Gray."

The paper's broader generalization — that "surveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other" — is recorded here as Lemley's own claim, directly quoted from a Tier 1 primary source, not as an independently re-verified vault fact; the underlying surveys themselves have not been traced.

Lemley's polarity is the mirror image of the vault's usual myth-correction shape: here the myth is a solitary genius and the truth is a social, near-simultaneous process, whereas the vault's other domain instances (e.g. claim-standard-gauge-descends-from-stephenson-not-roman-chariots, claim-barbier-night-writing-designed-for-blind-not-soldiers) usually run myth-as-false-deep-lineage against a contingent, mundane truth. Both shapes share the same higher-order pattern: a dramatic origin narrative overriding a messier documented reality. This gives the vault's existing multiple-discovery cluster — claim-reverse-mode-multiple-independent-discovery, claim-merton-multiple-discovery-is-sciences-dominant-pattern, claim-multiple-discovery-concept-was-itself-multiply-discovered — its first piece of outside grounding from legal/technology-history scholarship (a flagship, student-edited law review, per standard U.S. law-review practice — not a peer-reviewed journal), independent of the vault's own synthesis. See moc-attribution-and-origin-myths and entity-mark-lemley. Compare claim-hobsbawms-invented-tradition-is-adjacent-not-subsuming, the nearest pre-existing academic term to the same general shape.