I think you might be confusing Shannon with Shockley, one of the guys who worked on the transistor? In that case there were definitely other people working on it, and Shockley was pretty unambiguously kind-of-an-asshole who definitely tried to grab credit.
In Shannon’s case, everything I’ve read (notably including The Idea Factory) indicates that Shannon basically developed the whole thing, came out of left field and surprised basically everyone.
I think you might be confusing Shannon with Shockley, one of the guys who worked on the transistor? In that case there were definitely other people working on it, and Shockley was pretty unambiguously kind-of-an-asshole who definitely tried to grab credit.
In Shannon’s case, everything I’ve read (notably including The Idea Factory) indicates that Shannon basically developed the whole thing, came out of left field and surprised basically everyone.