Uncredited Inventors

Uncredited Inventors: History often hands the glory to whoever patented, published or promoted first, not whoever discovered first; Stigler's law of eponymy says no discovery is named after its original discoverer, and statistician Stephen Stigler fittingly credited the idea to someone else.

Rosalind Franklin: Her X-ray image Photo 51 revealed DNA's double helix, but it was shown to Watson and Crick without her knowledge, and she died four years before their 1962 Nobel Prize.

Alice Ball: In 1915, at age 23, she developed the first effective injectable treatment for leprosy, but after her death a colleague published it and it became known as the 'Dean method.'

Antonio Meucci: The Italian immigrant built a working voice telephone years before Alexander Graham Bell but could not afford to renew his patent caveat; the US House formally honored his work in 2002.

Elisha Gray: He filed paperwork for a telephone design at the US Patent Office on the very same day in 1876 as Bell, sparking a legal battle Bell ultimately won.

Nettie Stevens: In 1905 she discovered that X and Y chromosomes determine sex, but textbooks long credited her more famous male colleagues instead.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: As a graduate student in 1967 she discovered pulsars, yet the 1974 Nobel Prize went to her supervisor; decades later she donated her entire $3 million Breakthrough Prize to fund physics students.

Lise Meitner: She provided the physics explanation for nuclear fission, but her longtime partner Otto Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize alone; element 109, meitnerium, is named after her.

Chien-Shiung Wu: Her 1956 experiment proved that nature is not mirror symmetric, but the 1957 Nobel Prize went only to the two theorists who proposed the idea.

Hedy Lamarr: The Hollywood star co-patented a frequency hopping system in 1942 that became a foundation for WiFi and Bluetooth, yet she never earned a cent from it.

Philo Farnsworth: He sketched the idea for electronic television as a teenage farm boy and transmitted the first image in 1927, but RCA's publicity machine made its own engineers the faces of TV.

Joseph Swan: The English chemist lit his home with incandescent bulbs before Thomas Edison's version, and the two eventually merged their British businesses into a company called Ediswan.

Alfred Russel Wallace: He worked out natural selection independently while feverish in the Malay Archipelago and mailed it to Darwin, who rushed his own work into print.

Margaret Knight: She invented a machine to make flat bottomed paper bags, and when a man stole her design and claimed a woman could not invent it, she beat him in court in 1871.

Robert Kearns: He invented the intermittent windshield wiper, watched carmakers use it without paying, and spent decades suing Ford and Chrysler, eventually winning more than $28 million.

Marthe Gautier: In 1958 she identified the extra chromosome behind Down syndrome, but credit went to her colleague Jerome Lejeune, and she only told her side of the story 50 years later.

Candace Pert: As a graduate student she co-discovered the brain's opiate receptor, but a major 1978 prize went to her male supervisors, and she publicly protested the snub.

Raymond Damadian: A pioneer of MRI scanning, he was left out of the 2003 Nobel Prize for the technology and responded with full page newspaper ads calling it 'the shameful wrong that must be righted.'

Esther Lederberg: She discovered a key bacterial virus and co-invented replica plating, yet her husband Joshua received the 1958 Nobel Prize for work they did together.

Alan Emtage: As a student at McGill in 1990, he created Archie, the first internet search engine, years before Google, and never patented it.

Louis Le Prince: He filmed moving pictures in Leeds in 1888, years before Edison and the Lumiere brothers, then vanished from a French train in 1890 and was never seen again.

Walter Hunt: He sold the rights to his safety pin for $400 to pay a debt, and he built a working sewing machine years before Elias Howe but chose not to patent it.

Ida Noddack: In 1934 the German chemist suggested atoms could split into large fragments, five years before fission was confirmed, but physicists ignored her.

Eunice Newton Foote: In 1856 she showed carbon dioxide traps heat and linked it to Earth's climate, three years before John Tyndall, who usually gets the credit.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt: Her discovery of how to measure cosmic distances let Edwin Hubble prove the universe is expanding; a Swedish mathematician tried to nominate her for a Nobel Prize in 1925, not knowing she had died.