Who are some of the forgotten shapers of our society?

I’ve been watching a BBC series that talks about a man I’d never heard of, Edward Bernays, who pioneered the application of his uncle Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories to marketing and mass influence. He was the inventor of the field of Public Relations; the pioneer of the appeal to emotion and desire in advertising; the strategist behind the social acceptance of smoking among women; the advisor behind much of the Cold War propaganda strategy; the engineer of a Guatemalan political coup; the force behind a PR campaign to link capitalism and democracy in the minds of the American public…and on and on.

Watching this, I’m astonished to see that this one man is at the root of American consumerism as we know it, yet he’s now virtually unknown to those of us awash in the culture he spawned.

This makes me wonder who else may have strongly influenced how we live and think, then passed into obscurity.