IMO Edison and Shannon are both strong candidates for quite different reasons.
Edison solved a bunch of necessary problems in one go when building a working, commercializable lighting system. He did this in an area where many others had only chipped away at corners of the problem. He was not the first to the area...but I don't think there are any strong claims that the area would have come along nearly as quickly if not for him/his team. I talk about this in-depth in a Works in Progress piece on Edison as an exception technical entrepreneur.
As far as Shannon goes, I'm not saying he initially published on his two major discoveries much earlier than others would have initially published...but Shannon had a sort of uncanny ability to open and largely close a sub-field all in one go. This is rare in scientific branch creation. Usually a process likes this takes something like 5-10 people something like 5-20 years to do. My FreakTakes piece on the early years of molecular biology give a sort of blow-by-blow of what this often looks like. Shannon's excellence helped circumvent a lot of that. So IMO the thoroughness of his thinking was a huge time-saver.
Fun question!
IMO Edison and Shannon are both strong candidates for quite different reasons.
Edison solved a bunch of necessary problems in one go when building a working, commercializable lighting system. He did this in an area where many others had only chipped away at corners of the problem. He was not the first to the area...but I don't think there are any strong claims that the area would have come along nearly as quickly if not for him/his team. I talk about this in-depth in a Works in Progress piece on Edison as an exception technical entrepreneur.
As far as Shannon goes, I'm not saying he initially published on his two major discoveries much earlier than others would have initially published...but Shannon had a sort of uncanny ability to open and largely close a sub-field all in one go. This is rare in scientific branch creation. Usually a process likes this takes something like 5-10 people something like 5-20 years to do. My FreakTakes piece on the early years of molecular biology give a sort of blow-by-blow of what this often looks like. Shannon's excellence helped circumvent a lot of that. So IMO the thoroughness of his thinking was a huge time-saver.