Obscure Great Foobars

AKA People Who Really Deserve To Be Better Known.

"... no one wants to take the risk of deleting an entry that really does belong in any list of the World's Greatest Ever Foobars just because they happened not to have heard of it/him/her."

My first response was, "Ridiculous -- if people are Great they won't be obscure."

My second response was, "Ridiculous -- OF COURSE many Great people are still obscure."

List ObscureGreatFoobars here:

(This list is heavy on obscure inventors -- I want more obscure (but great) book authors, artists, managers, chefs, peacemakers, etc.)

I'll start -- E. L. Voynich, for The Gadfly ISBN 1589634284 , which I actually haven't read myself but which gets some of the best reviews I've ever seen.
Apparently Ts'ai Lun invented paper in 105 AD.
AlexeyPajitnov invented TetrisGame. http://www.sciencenews.org/20021026/mathtrek.asp He's famous, not obscure, it's just that Americans call him "that Russian guy" because we're bad at remembering Russian names, that's all. He used to be obscure when Tetris first gained popularity, but there have been endless articles and web discussions; he stopped being obscure over a dozen years ago.
Malcolm McLean invented the shipping container in the 1930s in New Jersey http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/news/malcolmmclean.html
The decimal point: "perfected" by John Napier (1550-1617).
Dr. Harold Edgerton invented the electronic flash
Sequoya (also known as George Guess) (c. 1760 - 1843) is one of the very few humans to invent an entire alphabet (in 1821) (not merely a different way of representing an alphabet) that is still used by many people, and (as far as I know) the only one whose name we know. Korean, too, see below. (No one really knows who invented the other alphabets - Roman, Greek, heiroglyphics, Chinese, futhark, etc. - and in fact many of the people who used these alphabets claimed they came from the gods, rather than being invented by humans.) This is not true. It is known that (1) no single individual invented any of these scripts, (2) Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphic writing evolved (and mutually influenced each other) from bookkeeping arithmetic tallying notations, and (3) 100% of all Western scripts gradually evolved from Sumerian and Egyptian (specifically including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, etc). The history of Chinese script is similar but somewhat more murky. It was an independent invention, and it was the basis for all other writing systems in Asia. Mayan hieroglyphs appear to be yet another independent invention, but vastly less is known about them. Still, there's no reason to think that any of them were invented by a single individual.
The Korean King Sejong invented the Korean script hangul (han'gûl) in the 15th century, unique in the world in being partly alphabetic and partly syllabic. There is direct evidence from 1446 that he at least designed the shapes of the characters and commanded the project that designed the overall principles of the script, and a possibility that he may have done every aspect of it himself.
Earl Bakken, inventor of the wearable cardiac pacemaker
Wilson Greatbatch invented the implantable cardiac pacemaker.
1843: Fax first patented by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain
DougEngelbart invented the computer mouse in 1963. I think he had the idea in 1959 and working models in 1968.
Jan Lukasiewicz (Wu-ka-sha-vich), noted Polish mathematician (1878-1956) (invented RPN). Perhaps more importantly, but less famously, invented Lukasiewicz analog logic, making Turing-complete analog computers possible. Most analog computers are not Turing-complete. This is not just a point of ancient history, they've found new (albeit niche) applications in the 21st century.
Oxford theologian John Wycliff (Wycliffe) invented bifocal eyeglasses. But I thought Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal eyeglasses.
Paul Nipkow invented the first television in 1884. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blnipkov.htm
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff
Dave Bradley invented CTRL-ALT-DELETE. (Who else was on the original team who engineered the IBM pc in 1981 ?) Supposedly he once said "But I have to share the credit, I might have invented it but Bill made it famous" right in front of Bill.
Who invented the "hot water system" ? ( hot water heater + hot water pipes ... either one wouldn't make sense alone )

Unknown ObscureGreatFoobars:

Who invented the FPGA? Not one person; also the definition is fuzzy (see PLA, PLD, fuse-programming, etc). Really ? What if I asked who invented RAM ? Is that also fuzzy ? Yes, unless you describe in excruciating detail what you mean. Out of many many possibilities, drum memory for instance is one possibility; you may not think you meant that, but it was used as we use RAM today. Similarly some used "RAM" as opposed to "core". Still not what you meant? How about mercury delay lines. Are you sure? Hmm. So too is the invention of the computer. Some say Babbage, others disagree, although he certainly figures in its development. Etc. OK, how about "solid-state memory" ?
Who developed the AsciiCode? A committee. It's an ANSI standard. So who was on this committee ? Dr. Ass and Dr. Key :-) Err... BobBemer and CalvinMooers among many others.
Who invented the idea of a "last name"? Someone who had only a first name, obviously.
- No one, last names are derived from patronymics: "Bob, son of John" --> "Bob Johnson". Last names are rare worldwide, except where influenced by western culture.
- The book "Gutenberg" by John Man claims that (in Germany during the 1400s) houses had names. The "last name" of a person was the name of the house he lived in. Johannes Gutenberg lived in the house named "Gutenberg". His father, Friele Gensfleish zur Laden, lived in the house named "Gensfleish".
  - That doesn't explain anything at all. Try replacing the word "house" with the word "household" to see what I mean. The physical building was named after the household. Not in the case of Friele, who lived in the house that gives me goose flesh, and his son Johann, who lived in the house on Jew's Hill. The building is called Gutenberg no matter who lived in it. What was the household name? Synonymous with the family name. That has gotten us nowhere at all. Surnames were developed in order to disambiguate different people with the same name. "Which John do you mean?" "You know, John, son of John, not the John who is son of Eric." Or disambiguation based on origin: the John that came here from Breton; the John that came here from the town of Norman; the John who works as a Smith/Baker....
- William the Conqueror's officers forced the Saxons to adopt last names.
Who invented the newspaper? And did its first edition give the invention front page coverage? {The Bible is a kind of newspaper, it was just not very timely.} Yes, but I speculate that some printer somewhere was thinking "Only a couple of people wanted that last book I printed. Once I'm through with this run of books, what book should I print next ? Wouldn't it be great if I could get a steady income printing something once a month or so that is guaranteed to sell ?"
- That sounds familiar, didn't Ben Franklin say something like that? (Not that he invented newspapers, but that story...)
- "The first English-language newspaper ... was published in 1620 in Amsterdam, Holland." -- Knight-Ridder/Tribune 1995 Aug. 8
- Some web sites list without explanation "1609 von Sohne, Julius". Others note there's an entire book on the subject. A few explain more detail about their origins in the 1600s and seem to agree that as such it was invented November 1641. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0293/457_114/55249929/p1/article.jhtml
- This would probably depend on how you define "newspaper". If a country is victorious in battle and prints up a bunch of accounts of the battle and pastes copies all over the place, is this a newspaper or not or something in-between? How many copies have to be printed before it is considered a newspaper? I think of it more as people expecting the next issue; how many identical copies of any particular issue is pretty irrelevant.
Inventor of the game of Go

seems somehow related to PagesPeopleNeverVisitAnymore .