None of these people took the reading. The record of each shows the shape.
Henry Cavendish (1731 to 1810)
The English scientist Henry Cavendish published few papers, and his notes on electricity, which held results now known by the names of Coulomb and Ohm, came out only when James Clerk Maxwell edited them in 1879. A run of hard results, each one reached and then left unpublished, shows the shape from outside.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Sherlock Holmes (fiction)
In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890), Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that when the police bring him a case they cannot solve he claims no credit, his name appears in no newspaper, and the work itself is his reward. Case after hard case taken on and closed, while the papers name someone else, shows the shape from outside.
Source: gutenberg.org