Great scientists and inventors who hovered under the radar

But not for writer and former Oxford Lord Mayor Ann Spokes Symonds, who over decades has been fascinated with the great “also-rans of history”.

For it seems that for a good many of the greatest discoveries and inventions, there is someone who has gone unrecognised, had the glory snatched away and never received the gratitude of mankind that was properly due.

Now, at the age of 89, Mrs Spokes Symonds has decided the time has come to put things right in a book, Also-Rans: The Injustice of History, about those who discovered or invented things for which others have taken all or much of the credit.

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“In some cases the also-rans got there simultaneously with the more famous. But unlike their competitors did not have champions at the time,” observes Mrs Spokes Symonds, of Davenant Road, Oxford.

“Others found that the joy and pleasure of invention and discovery was enough for them and that fame was of no interest.”

She reckons to have been “collecting” the unappreciated for more than 20 years, with the book taking two-and-a-half years to write.

“Most have suffered from the injustice of history,” she says in the introduction. “My intention in writing about these people is to give credit where credit is due and to put right the injustices. I have not intended to denigrate those who have become famous to the detriment of the lesser known. Some, as in the case of Fleming and Darwin, were happy to point out that others should have had more credit.”

Two Oxford men figure prominently in the book: Norman Heatley, “the unsung hero of penicillin” and Edward Stone, a country vicar born in 1702, who discovered aspirin.

The story of Heatley is the more familiar. It is now recognised that the work of an Oxford-based team headed by Howard Florey in the penicillin story fell victim to “the Fleming myth”, which gave almost total credit to the Scottish scientist, who still made the top 20 in a poll of top Britons in the past thousand years and has had a crater on the moon named after him.

But while Florey, chair of pathology at Oxford, and Ernst Chain had the consolation of picking up a Nobel prize for medicine along with Fleming, the third member of the Oxford team – Heatley – became the forgotten man.

Heatley, though the youngest member of the Oxford team, was in many ways the most inventive, and was instrumental in solving the most difficult problem of producing penicillin in sufficient quantities to combat bacterial infection. Late in life, he would at least receive an Honorary Doctorate from Oxford University, with a blue plaque now adorning the house where he lived in Marston.

The remarkable story of aspirin is altogether less well-known. Stone, a curate at Charlton-on-Otmoor and then a chaplain at Chipping Norton before becoming a Fellow of Wadham College, made his great discovery while out walking in 1798, when suffering various aches and pains. He “accidentally” tasted a piece of bark from a white willow tree. Quickly realising it might have therapeutic properties, he undertook experiments, grinding willow bark into powder. He gave the substance to about 50 people to cure various agues and disorders over a five-year period.

Salicylic acid (the word salix meaning willow) is the active ingredient of aspirin. But a century would pass before Stone’s discovery was developed into the popular painkiller and fever reducer, with Stone remaining largely unknown.

Mention the word evolution and natural selection and who comes to mind? Surely the man whose face was on the £10 note and had a whole set of postage stamps printed in tribute to his work.

But Welsh-born scientist Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin.

The inventor of the steam locomotive: George Stephenson or James Watt surely? Stephenson can rightly be called the founder of the railways but it is the Cornishman Richard Trevithick who invented what was to run on the railway lines, argues Mrs Spokes Symonds.

She admits exposing injustice was her real motivation.

Her great grandfather, a mayor of Reading, after being knighted by Queen Victoria, took as the family motto ‘Fiat justitia ruat coelum’ – “Do right (or justice) though the heavens fall,” she points out.

It remains to be seen if the former Oxford Lord Mayor changes public perceptions about 17 great men and women and corrects the injustices of history. Either way, her also-rans should ensure that what may prove her last long book is a real winner.

Also-Rans: The Injustice of History by Ann Spokes Symonds (Robert Boyd Publications. £11.95)

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