Each life here is drawn from its own record, which 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 in 1879, when James Clerk Maxwell edited them. A run of hard results, each one reached and then kept in his notes, 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 beyond them, he leaves them the credit, keeps his name out of the newspapers, and finds his reward in the work itself. Case after hard case taken on and closed, while the papers name someone else, shows the shape from outside.
Source: gutenberg.org