Back in 1903, someone was going to invent the airplane.
People were working on it in New Zealand, Brazil, France, Germany and America. It just happened to be that two brothers who had a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, travelled to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and took off with the first airplane, the Wright Flyer.
But if they had not succeeded, one of the others almost certainly would have. It might have been 1904, or 1905, but powered flight was inevitable.
And that’s currently what’s happening in the world of lithium development from sedimentary brines.