The Greatest Inventors Alive Today

If you measure the importance of an inventor by the impact of their inventions, Scott Jones wins: If you've ever received or left a message for someone on a phone — that is, if you've ever used voicemail — you have Jones to thank.

Scott Jones didn't invent the idea of voicemail. The concept and various systems to provide the service existed for decades according to Interesting Engineering, but they were impractical. They were large and expensive, and didn't offer enough capacity to make them very useful.

But as reported by Indianapolis Monthly, when Jones launched Boston Technology in 1986, he invented a way to scale voicemail in a way that allowed companies to store millions of messages, thus making it practical for the first time. The invention made Jones incredibly wealthy, but he didn't stop there. Indystar reports that Jones went on to invent the technology that allowed programs like iTunes to look up information about digital music being played, and he did groundbreaking work in robotics designing a self-driving vehicle decades before Tesla and marketing a robotic lawnmower that was precise enough to be used on professional golf courses.

Sadly, an expensive divorce and a series of business failures — including a search engine platform that used human guides to enhance results — have drained Jones' fortune, once estimated at $400 million, leaving him heavily in debt despite his inventions.

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