Challenger Self-sufficient World Process
Think of a diver who has mapped new caves for decades and lets others publish the maps.
One of the sixteen types a reading can name. Begin the reading
This shape goes first where nobody has worked yet, so that the people who follow have somewhere to start. There is no last stop, and the work goes on the same if the credit ends up with someone else.
None of these people took the reading. The record of each shows the shape.
Alfred Russel Wallace spent four years collecting in the Amazon and eight in the Malay Archipelago, where he gathered 125,660 specimens. He reached the theory of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin, and in 1889 he called his own book on it Darwinism. Twelve years of first work in new ground for others to build on, with the theory's name handed to another man, show the shape from outside.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org, gutenberg.org
In Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees (1953), the shepherd Elzéard Bouffier plants trees for decades in a bare valley in the foothills of the Alps near Provence, officials take the new forest for a natural oddity, and the more than ten thousand people who later live there do not know whom they owe it to. Work done ahead of the people who will need it, kept up for decades and never traced to its maker, shows the shape from outside.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
The Torchbearer shares three of these sides and differs on being seen: it carries its cause where everyone can see it and wants people to pick it up, while this shape goes ahead with or without an audience.
Each shares three sides with this shape. On the right is the side it has instead.