Kind of a silly question if you ask me ... and since it's an open forum, you did.
Considering that two people were independently working on the invention of radio, more than one working one electricity and it's many applications, more than one busily inventing flying vehicles, etc. etc.
With billions of people in this world, somebody will inadvertently duplicate someone else's design. It's the old existential equation ... if you have a million monkeys randomly typing on a million typewriters, one of them will eventually type out a Shakespeare worthy work of art. With 300 million plus people in this this country alone ... that's a lot of monkeys !!!