And further, even if it had been invented five times over, would it have been known about by the right people had the patent not forced a public documentation of the design?
This is a good question to which we can never know the answer. Every time this discussion happens I can't help but think that the solution is to make patents much harder to get and/or last for a shorter time.
Theoretically, without them a big company can just copy or reverse engineer your design and sell it for cheaper than you can make it. In practice, big companies just patent a bunch of vague stuff so that no matter how innovative what you come up with is it will somehow end up covered. I've seen this happen over and over.
That makes it seem like we're far, far over some threshold where patents switch from protecting inventors to preventing inventors from doing much of anything.
