@arcana @affine @allison @apophis My knowledge of those individuals as actual historical characters is practically nil, but even so that barely applies to inventions.

In both cases their emergence is largely prompted by appropriate conditions for their appearance, which in the case of inventions is even more strongly affected by communications & information availability, and for inventions their appearance is not mutually exclusive. As a result, inventions do not generally exhibit anything approaching the heroic theory in practice.

The frequent mutual exclusivity in historical events and memory probably accounts for the majority of the observed "great man theory".