Interestingly, it took until after the invention of SONAR for the theory that bats navigate by echolocation to be accepted. The theory that bats use hearing for spatial awareness was first proposed in the late 18th century, with experimental evidence, but was rejected by the scientific establishment for more than a century. People didn't know marine mammals used echolocation until the 1950s.
I didn't know this, but the intuition that a tech example will be easier to grasp than an example from biology was why I mentioned sonar before bats in the first place.
Fascinating to find out that the scientific community had this kind of bias as well.