Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>time dialation (something completely alien to all before him >Hendrik Lorentz prop Lorentz did not think that time actually dilated; his notion of "local time" he considered purely a mathematical trick, unrelated to actual physics, in the same manner that renormalization sweeps away infinities in a clever manner. Here's the quote: "While for Lorentz length contraction was a real physical effect, he considered the t…
It is in the ballpark. The point is that Einstein did not pull a rabbit out of his hat, others had thought similar weirdness, and Einstein was aware of it.
Yes, plenty of people were working on similar stuff - this is true for every single case I've ever dug into (Newton, Gauss, Tesla, Einstein, Witten, Feynman, Wright Brothers, Marconi, transistor, laser, fission, fusion, ...), but to claim (as you did) that the person who actually make the breakthrough did not do it (and backing it by lies, as I sourced), is deceitful.
I've yet to see someone create something so vastly improved from the world around them that it would not have been made by another person or group immediately. But that does not mean it's fine to discount the work of the person who did it first, especially if that requires falsehoods.