[pseudohadamard]

There's always someone somewhere who, with hindsight, did something that could be retconned into being similar to something important we've got today, von Däniken being an extreme example. Not putting down Losev's work, but accidentally stumbling on an interesting physical effect that you treat as a curiosity and engaging in targeted research to turn in into a product is a very different thing. For example the FET was envisaged multiple times in the same time frame as Losev's work, but wasn't rigorously pursued until Bardeen et al came along.