Why was Wantzel overlooked for a century? The changing importance of an impossibility result (Q1045847)

In a fascinating account of the vagaries of being (un)noticed by history or even by one's contemporaries, this is the story of the reasons why Pierre Wantzel's 1837 proof of the impossibility of trisecting the angle, duplicating the cube, or constructing with ruler and compass a regular \(n\)-gon for sides other than those of the form \(2^m p_1\ldots p_k\), where \(p_1, \ldots, p_k\) are different Fermat primes, was ignored for a century after its publication. The first to give Wantzel credit for the first two impossibilities was \textit{Max Simon} in [Über die Entwicklung der Elementargeometrie im XIX. Jahrhundert. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner (1906; JFM 37.0046.01)], but since it was published as a supplementary volume to the yearbook of the \textit{Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung}, rather then the \textit{Encyclopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften}, as planned, it went unnoticed. It was followed by the paper devoted to Wantzel's life and mathematics by \textit{F. Cajori} [Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 24, 339--347 (1918; JFM 46.0013.04)]. The first encyclopedic mention of Wantzel in the context of the impossibility of geometric constructions is in \textit{H. Weber} and \textit{J. Wellstein} [Enzyklopädie der Elementar-Mathematik. Ein Handbuch für Lehrer und Studierende. Bd. 1. Arithmetik, Algebra und Analysis. Von H. Weber. Neubearb.\ v. P. Epstein. 5. Aufl. Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner (1934; Zbl 0010.25305)], and the first in a general history of mathematics in \textit{J. Tropfke} [Geschichte der Elementarmathematik in systematischer Darstellung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Fachwörter. Bd. 3. Proportionen, Gleichungen. 3., verb. Aufl. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (1937; Zbl 0016.14501)], from which ``time on it became commonplace to attribute the impossibility theorem to Wantzel.'' After presenting Wantzel's proof and fixing a gap in it discovered not long ago by Robin Hartshorne, the author asks why the long neglect and finds that: (i) it couldn't have been for reasons of obscurity of the publication, as it was published very prominently in Liouville's \textit{Journal}, (ii) it couldn't have been for absence of novelty, as it was indeed the first published proof of the impossibilities (Abel's result from an unfinished paper from about 1828, which was published only in 1839, could have been used to prove the impossibilities, but Abel did not take that step, and no one, until 1870 even noticed the possible priority); (iii) it couldn't have been for the relative simplicity of the proof, as it used methods that were rather novel at the time, championed by Gauß\, and Abel. The author argues that the result ``was not considered particularly important at the time'' in the prevailing constructive paradigm, in which mathematicians were concerned with actually solving problems and not with metamathematical results regarding impossibilities, and finds that Paolo Ruffini's attempt at proving the impossibility of the solution of the quintic by radicals suffered a similar fate. The revival of interest in Wantzel's achievement came with the metamathematical turn, exemplified by Hilbert's emphasis at the 1900 Paris Congress on impossibility proofs.