| Sure. Alistair Pilkington and Arthur Fowle, between the two of them invented the technologies used to create almost all glass. It might not seem like it's high impact, but from the glass in office buildings, to automotive glass, to smartphone/tablet/TV glass, two highly impactful people who touched more than Elon Musk has. Allan Alcorn invented Pong. It spawned and inspired an industry that grew to almost $100 billion, and the technologies used in video games have spread, again, to every aspect of technology, to the point that Microsoft used Cortana, a video game character, to leverage name/brand recognition with gamers in one if it's core products. Bill Gates, for better or worse, transformed the personal computing industry, and has been on a humanitarian campaign for the last several years. Setting aside food supply management politics, Robert Fraley introduced the first work on transgenic foods and continues to be a strong contributor to modern food science. Norman Borlaug. "and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation" is the best introduction a human could have. If you don't know who he is or what he did, you owe it to yourself to learn more :) Moving on to relative contemporaries: Linus Torvalds made Linux, which as you may have heard, has impacted technology a bit. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau basically invented the web and inspired the modern web. On the tech and financial side, Mark Zuckerberg has done quite well with Facebook, and for better or worse is driving connectivity into unconnected parts of the world. Elon Musk is a visionary, and is pretty cool, but he is not exactly once-in-a-generation. |