Every single day of your life you pass a person on the street or in your car not knowing who they are.  Sure you might see them pick their nose or scratch their crotch.  You blow them off as just another schmuck that was part of your day.

What you don’t know is that some of these people just might be the game changers of our time.  That little kid  you thought was a brat just might be responsible for a huge part of your future life.

Here are 10 people you didn’t know changed the world…..

Thanks to Forbes for some of these.

Tim Berners Lee

Tim Berners-Lee kick-started the World Wide Web in 1989, designing and building the first Web browser, editor and server.  So yeah, I think that qualifies as somewhat of a game changer wouldn’t you say?  But I’m quite certain if I asked you who did this you’d probably say Al Gore.   Did you know that forward slashes (//) are unnecessary?

Jack Kilby And Robert Noyce

Kilby and Noyce independently invented the single integrated circuit in 1959, clearing one of the greatest obstacles to faster and more powerful computers.  In other words these guys invented the microchip.  Oh yeah and Noyce founded Intel so that’s kind of significant.   Kilby also built the first personal calculator.

Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield

These guys invented Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs).   If not for the technology what in the hell would we do to diagnose the myriad on internal injuries that we see today?  Talk about a leap forward in the medical field.

Gregory Pincus, M.C. Chang, and John Rock

In 1953 Pincus and his colleague Min-Chueh Chang proved that hormones could prevent ovulation in animals. Similar work was being undertaken by Dr. John Rock at Harvard, and he and Pincus joined efforts to conduct human trials in 1956. In 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid, the first contraceptive pill

Malcolm McLean

It would be much more efficient if dock cranes were able to pick up the entire trailer part of a truck and place it onto a ship, rather than continue with the hugely expensive and time-consuming method of loading (and unloading) a ship crate by crate.  What does this mean he invented?  The shipping container.  To imagine how much money this has saved the shipping industry is something we can’t even calculate.

Jim Clark

Many people might argue a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as far as the internet and tech but I’m going with Jim Clark, probably because many people don’t know his name.  Clark paved the way for digital cable and connecting the internet to television.  He came up with this concept long before it was possible the way we see it today.  He’s also responsible for three dimensional graphics in computers.  Oh and let’s not forget he started 3 companies that all reached a billion dollars in worth.  Not bad.  He’s responsible for the tech boom in the mid to late 90s.