History tends to remember invention through a handful of famous names. Thomas Edison gets the light bulb. Alexander Graham Bell gets the telephone. The Wright brothers get the airplane.

The real history of invention is much messier.

Technologies usually develop through dozens of experiments, improvements and competing ideas. Sometimes the person remembered today was the one who commercialized an invention rather than the first to imagine it. In other cases, brilliant inventors simply disappeared from the popular story.

Some had their work overlooked because of race, gender or social status. Others created components that became enormously important without becoming famous themselves. A few were simply unlucky enough to invent something before the world was ready for it.

Here are some inventors whose names deserve to be much more familiar.

Garrett Morgan made streets safer

Garrett Morgan was born in Kentucky in 1877 to formerly enslaved parents and eventually became a successful inventor and businessman.

One of his best-known inventions addressed a problem created by the rapidly growing number of cars on American streets.

Early traffic signals were relatively simple. Morgan developed and patented a traffic-control device that introduced an intermediate stage intended to stop traffic in all directions before movement changed.

The idea helped address the dangerous transition between stop and go.

Morgan also developed a safety hood designed to protect people from smoke and harmful gases. A version of the device was famously used during a rescue following an explosion in a tunnel beneath Lake Erie.

His inventions dealt with problems that modern society still considers essential: traffic management and respiratory protection.

Yet his name is far less familiar than many inventors from the same period.

Mary Anderson saw the obvious problem with driving in bad weather

Sometimes an invention seems so obvious afterward that it is difficult to imagine a world without it.

The windshield wiper is a perfect example.

During a visit to New York City in the early 1900s, Mary Anderson reportedly noticed that drivers had difficulty seeing through windows during bad weather.

Her solution was a manually operated device with a blade that could clear the windshield from inside the vehicle.

She received a patent in 1903.

At the time, the invention was not an immediate commercial success. Cars themselves were still relatively new, and the automobile industry had not yet become the enormous global business it would soon become.

Eventually, windshield wipers became standard equipment.

Anderson’s story demonstrates one of the frustrating realities of invention.

You can solve the right problem before the market realizes it has one.

Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher for a very practical reason

Josephine Cochrane was tired of her dishes getting damaged.

According to the commonly told story, household servants sometimes chipped her expensive china while washing it by hand. Rather than accepting the problem, she decided to build a machine capable of washing dishes more safely.

Her design used water pressure rather than scrubbers and held dishes securely inside racks.

Cochrane patented her dishwasher in the 1880s and began selling machines, particularly to hotels and restaurants.

Early dishwashers were not immediately practical for every household. Many homes lacked the plumbing and hot-water systems needed to make them convenient.

But the basic concept survived.

Decades later, dishwashers became ordinary kitchen appliances.

Millions of people now press a button after dinner without knowing the name of the woman who helped make that possible.

Lewis Latimer helped make electric lighting practical

Thomas Edison dominates the popular history of electric lighting.

Lewis Latimer deserves a place in that story too.

Latimer was a draftsman, engineer and inventor who worked in the rapidly developing electrical industry of the late nineteenth century. He contributed improvements related to carbon filaments used in incandescent lighting and worked with major electrical companies.

His technical expertise also extended beyond lighting.

Earlier in his career, Latimer prepared patent drawings connected with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone work.

The son of parents who had escaped slavery, Latimer built a remarkable engineering career during a period when opportunities for Black inventors were severely restricted.

His story is a reminder that famous inventions are rarely the work of one famous person.

Entire networks of engineers and inventors make technologies practical.

Margaret Knight helped automate the paper bag

Paper bags are so ordinary that their design barely seems like an invention.

Producing them efficiently was another matter.

Margaret Knight developed machinery capable of making flat-bottomed paper bags, a shape far more useful than simple envelope-style bags.

Her invention also led to a famous patent dispute.

A man who had seen the machine attempted to patent a similar design. Knight challenged him and ultimately secured recognition for her invention.

This was particularly significant in an era when women inventors frequently struggled to be taken seriously.

Knight continued inventing throughout her life and received numerous patents.

Today, the basic form of the flat-bottomed paper bag remains instantly recognizable.

The inventor behind the machinery that helped produce it is much less so.

Granville Woods helped build the modern railway

Railways transformed nineteenth-century life, but making them safe and efficient required far more than building locomotives.

Granville T. Woods contributed numerous inventions related to electrical and railway systems.

One of his important areas of work involved communication between moving trains and railway stations.

Better communication could help rail operators understand where trains were located and reduce the risk of accidents.

Woods became such a prolific inventor that he was sometimes called the “Black Edison.”

He also became involved in patent disputes with major figures and companies, demonstrating how competitive the rapidly expanding electrical industry had become.

His inventions contributed to infrastructure used by millions of people, even if passengers rarely knew his name.

Hedy Lamarr was more than a Hollywood star

Hedy Lamarr is unusual because she was not forgotten.

What was forgotten for years was that she was also an inventor.

Lamarr became famous as a Hollywood actress during the 1930s and 1940s. During World War II, however, she worked with composer George Antheil on a communication system intended to make radio-controlled torpedoes harder to disrupt.

Their concept involved rapidly switching between radio frequencies.

The specific wartime system was not widely deployed as originally imagined, but frequency-hopping concepts later became important in communications technology.

Lamarr’s story became increasingly celebrated decades later as people rediscovered the technical work hidden behind her Hollywood image.

Her career challenges one of the easiest assumptions to make about inventors: that they are supposed to look or behave like inventors.

Stephanie Kwolek gave us Kevlar

Some inventions begin with someone searching for something completely different.

Chemist Stephanie Kwolek was working at DuPont during the 1960s when her research led to an unusual synthetic fiber.

That material eventually became Kevlar.

Kevlar combines relatively low weight with remarkable strength and is now used in products ranging from protective equipment to cables, tires and aerospace components.

Its applications became much broader than the original research problem that led to its discovery.

Kwolek received significant recognition during her lifetime, but her name remains far less familiar to the general public than the material she helped create.

Millions of people know Kevlar.

Far fewer know Stephanie Kwolek.

Great inventions usually have complicated family trees

The idea of the lone genius having a sudden breakthrough makes for a great story.

It is rarely the whole story.

Most technologies have long family trees. One inventor creates an early version. Another improves it. Someone else develops a manufacturing process. A company makes it affordable. Years later, another engineer adapts it for a completely different purpose.

Deciding who “invented” something can therefore become surprisingly difficult.

That does not make individual contributions less important.

It makes remembering more of those contributors important.

Being remembered is not the same as being influential

Fame and impact do not always travel together.

Some inventors become household names because their stories are easy to tell. Others contribute one crucial piece to a technology that eventually reaches billions of people and disappear from public memory.

Yet we encounter their work constantly.

We drive safely through intersections. Windshield wipers clear the rain. Dishwashers clean plates. Paper bags stand upright. Protective fibers save lives.

The inventors may have faded from popular culture.

Their ideas did not.

Sometimes the most successful invention is the one that becomes so ordinary that nobody remembers there was ever a time before someone thought of it.