John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, then Secretary of the Royal Society (later on he was President of the Society) remarked on his arranging for the first publication of a brilliant 1845 paper by John James Waterston in 1892 in the Society's journal: `The history of this paper suggests that highly speculative investigations, especially by an unknown author, are best brought before the world through some other channel than a scientific society, which naturally hesitates to admit into its printed records matter of uncertain value.'
In times past, both of Galileo’s published dialogues might count, except that Galileo when he published would not qualify as an unknown other. Neither, more recently, would Grigori Perelman be considered an unknown in connection with his proof of the Poincaré conjecture.
Can you think of examples where scientific ideas were successfully introduced to the world by an unknown scientist other than through a scientific society?
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