Well there is a difference between knowing and postulating. Like continental drift or the idea that plates move. Wegener was basically laughed out of the room even though he was onto something.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/continental-drift-versus-plate-tectonics

It doesn't always pay to be too far ahead. There was also Cavendesh who to quote his wiki:

"Because of his asocial and secretive behaviour, Cavendish often avoided publishing his work, and much of his findings were not told even to his fellow scientists. In the late nineteenth century, long after his death, James Clerk Maxwell looked through Cavendish's papers and found observations and results for which others had been given credit.

Examples of what was included in Cavendish's discoveries or anticipations were Richter's law of reciprocal proportions, Ohm's law, Dalton's law of partial pressures, principles of electrical conductivity (including Coulomb's law), and Charles's Law of gases. A manuscript "Heat", tentatively dated between 1783 and 1790, describes a "mechanical theory of heat". Hitherto unknown, the manuscript was analysed in the early 21st century. Historian of science Russell McCormmach proposed that "Heat" is the only 18th-century work prefiguring thermodynamics. Theoretical physicist Dietrich Belitz concluded that in this work Cavendish "got the nature of heat essentially right"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cavendish

Science is weird and the scientists are even weirder.