The Most Famous
INVENTORS from India
Top 3
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Indian Inventors of all time. This list of famous Indian Inventors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity.
1. John Shepherd-Barron (1925 - 2010)
With an HPI of 56.67, John Shepherd-Barron is the most famous Indian Inventor. His biography has been translated into 26 different languages on wikipedia.
John Adrian Shepherd-Barron OBE (23 June 1925 – 15 May 2010) was an India-born British inventor, who led the team that installed the first cash machine, sometimes referred to as the automated teller machine or ATM.
2. Arunachalam Muruganantham (b. 1961)
With an HPI of 49.03, Arunachalam Muruganantham is the 2nd most famous Indian Inventor. His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.
Arunachalam Muruganantham (born 12 October 1961) also known as Padman is a social entrepreneur from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, India. He is the inventor of a low-cost sanitary pad-making machine and is credited for innovating grassroots mechanisms for generating awareness about traditional unhygienic practices around menstruation in rural India. His mini-machines, which can manufacture sanitary pads for less than a third of the cost of commercial pads, have been installed in 23 of the 28 states of India in rural areas. He is currently planning to expand the production of these machines to 106 nations. The movie Period. End of Sentence. won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for the year 2018. The 2018 Hindi film Pad Man was made on his invention, where he was portrayed by Akshay Kumar. In 2014, he was included in Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2016, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.
3. Shiva Ayyadurai (b. 1963)
With an HPI of 45.37, Shiva Ayyadurai is the 3rd most famous Indian Inventor. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai (born Vellayappa Ayyadurai Shiva on December 2, 1963) is an Indian-American engineer, entrepreneur, and anti-vaccine activist. He has become known for promoting conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and unfounded medical claims. Ayyadurai holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including a PhD in biological engineering, and is a Fulbright grant recipient. In a 2011 article published by Time, Ayyadurai claimed to have invented email as a teenager; in August 1982, he registered the copyright on an email application he had written, asserting in his copyright filing, "I, personally, feel EMAIL is as sophisticated as any electronic mail system on the market today." Historians strongly dispute this account because email was already in use in the early 1970s. Ayyadurai sued Gawker Media and Techdirt for defamation for disputing his account of inventing email; both lawsuits were settled out of court. Ayyadurai and Techdirt agreed to Techdirt's articles remaining online with a link to Ayyadurai's rebuttal on his own website. Ayyadurai also attracted attention for two reports: the first questioning the working conditions of India's largest scientific agency; the second questioning the safety of genetically modified food, such as soybeans. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ayyadurai became known for a social media COVID-19 disinformation campaign, spreading conspiracy theories about the cause of COVID-19, promoting unfounded COVID-19 treatments, and campaigning to fire Anthony Fauci for allegedly being a deep state actor. Ayyadurai garnered 3.39% of the vote as an independent candidate in the 2018 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, and ran for the Republican Party nomination in the 2020 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts but lost to Kevin O'Connor in the primary. After the election, he promoted false claims of election fraud. In 2024, Ayyadurai launched a campaign for president of the United States. However, because he is not a natural-born American citizen, he is ineligible to serve as president.
People
Pantheon has 3 people classified as Indian inventors born between 1925 and 1963. Of these 3, 2 (66.67%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Indian inventors include Arunachalam Muruganantham, and Shiva Ayyadurai. The most famous deceased Indian inventors include John Shepherd-Barron. As of April 2024, 1 new Indian inventors have been added to Pantheon including Shiva Ayyadurai.
