That Dyson guy, known for the vacuum cleaner, invents other stuff, too. I don’t think any of it counts as world-changing though.
game changing eh? - then you cant go past Rubik who has invented at a dozen or more Ernő Rubik - Wikipedia
Not one of his workers, actually they were pretty much rivals. Tesla won but got forgotten
How can anyone forget Ron “Ronco” Popeil?
In a certain sense, perhaps, but far less so than most of their predecessors and contemporaries in aeronautical research. They did not merely make minor tweaks to earlier designs. For instance, they were the first to realize aircraft would have to be fully controllable in three axes, and to incorporate that principle in their designs.
They tried working from aeronautic data tables compiled by earlier researchers (Octave Chanute, IIRC), only to find that they were all wrong. They had to start from scratch and invent the windtunnel to collect their own data.
The Wrights weren’t merely the fortunate beneficiaries of lots of previous work, lucky to be at the right time and place. They were aware of previous and contemporary work, but they understood the mistakes others were making and overcame those errors through careful, methodical, scientific work of a kind that few others even attempted to duplicate.
That is all correct. The Wright brothers were much more impressive scientist/inventors than most people know and they certainly didn’t just make tweaks to existing designs. Even after they achieved successful sustained flight, they still didn’t want the whole world to know much about it. It wasn’t until 1906 when they were forced to give head to head demonstrations against their peers like Langley and they destroyed everyone else that dared to challenge them. The Wright Brothers were a few generations into their aircraft design by that point and could literally fly rings against any other aircraft in a demonstration. They were guaranteed to succeed at some point because of the meticulous way that they approached the problems at hand.
There was hypertext before HTML, you know. I’d consider HTML more along the lines of “a neat idea that really got legs”. IMO the development of GML was vastly more significant than the development of HTML.
On another note, don’t forget about “process” innovators like Ford and Deming.