[mhb]

Maybe that's very clever or just dumb semantic nitpicking, but unless you say more no one will know which you think it is.

[jrh3]

I think only discovered. It was always there, but someone(s) just had to do the work to find it.

[mitthrowaway2]

There's a word for this concept, discovering useful techniques that were always there but which nobody else had discovered before; we call it "invention".

[lmpdev]

That’s just Plato’s Theory of Forms