---
title: "Ogburn & Thomas, \"Are Inventions Inevitable?\" (1922)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Ogburn & Thomas (1922)"
aliases: ["William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas","Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution"]
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["multiple discovery",[["entity-robert-merton|Robert K. Merton"]],"social evolution / technological determinism","priority disputes","Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution (1922)"]
---


William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas's 1922 "Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution" is the founding empirical study of the multiple-discovery tradition — a catalog of roughly 148 cases of independent simultaneous invention and discovery that the entire [[entity-robert-merton|Merton]]/Garfield/Simonton lineage builds on. The vault has cited it repeatedly as the field's origin point ([[claim-multiple-discovery-concept-was-itself-multiply-discovered]], [[claim-credit-assignment-spans-sociology-and-backprop]]) and it is the lineage against which [[claim-chandler-simultaneous-discoveries-are-incremental-repackagings|Tertius Chandler's rival repackaging thesis]] is measured for its absence in [[claim-garfield-1980-survey-omits-chandler|Garfield's 1980 survey]], which names Ogburn & Thomas among the standard figures it covers. It had recurred across three claim-notes with no hub of its own until now.

## References

- [[claim-multiple-discovery-concept-was-itself-multiply-discovered]]
- [[claim-credit-assignment-spans-sociology-and-backprop]]
- [[claim-chandler-simultaneous-discoveries-are-incremental-repackagings]]
- [[claim-garfield-1980-survey-omits-chandler]]