Voigt transformations in retrospect: missed opportunities? One more essay on the Einstein-Poincar\'e priority dispute

Perception of the world by human beings, and of scientific papers in particular, depends on everybody's background shaped by historical circumstances. As put in words by English poet William Blake, in his idiosyncratic and provocative form, "A fool sees not the same tree as the wise man sees". Scientific knowledge is progressing continuously. Therefore, it is not surprising that reading today a paper written more than a hundred years ago, we can extract much more of it than was actually thought or dreamed by the author himself. We demonstrate this on the example of Woldemar Voigt's 1887 paper. From the modern perspective, it may appear that this paper opens a way to both the special relativity and to its anisotropic Finslerian generalization which came into the focus only recently, in relation with the Cohen and Glashow's very special relativity proposal. With some imagination, one can connect Voigt's paper to the notorious Einstein-Poincar\'e priority dispute, which we comment in light of the above mentioned relativity of perception of scientific papers.