There is a debate (actually a diatribe against Apple) about why Steve Jobs’ death was so much more covered and revered in the media compared to the true innovator Dennis Ritchie. So do you know any other famous “pairs” of people to use to illustrate the phenomena where one person is remembered (either due to application, better selling of the idea) disproportionately?
I’d like to agitate the “discussion”:
Newton vs. Leibniz
Watson and Crick vs. Rosalind Franklin
Brahe vs. Kepler (this one barely squeaks by but Brahe is primarily remembered for a fake nose and a full bladder)
Jefferson has been by far the more famous of the two since probably the day after they both died. In recent years though Adams’ life has been made more well known by McCullough’s biography and the TV series based on it.
During my school years though (in the 70s and 80s), Adams’ life and legacy were ignored almost entirely.
Jonbenet Ramsey vs the other missing/murdered kids across the US in 1996.
Seriously, the wikipedia page on Missing White Woman Syndrome is illuminating: “Two cases of missing pretty girl syndrome are given as contrasting examples: the murder of Hannah Williams and the murder of Danielle Jones. Although both victims were white female teenagers, Jones received more coverage than Williams. It is suggested that this is because Jones was a middle-class schoolgirl, whilst Williams was from a working-class background with a stud in her nose and estranged parents.”
Kekule was a great chemist who is famous for coming up with the structure of benzene, and hence the genearl phenomenon of aromaticity in organic structure. The structure came to him in a dream, he said, as he dozed on a London omnibus and visualised a snake eating his own tail - an evocative image that makes a memorable anecdote for 150 years-worth of chemistry undergraduates.
An alternative source for Kekule’s vision is that he read Josef Loschmidt’s paper on aromatic structure 4 years earlier and appropriated the idea himself.
Loschmidt was virtually unknown to modern students of chemistry but some recent efforts by chemistry historians have redressed things a bit - his structural work pre-dating Kekule’s is now reasonably well known.