What about Steven Jobs and Bill Gates? they revolutionized the computer industry (along with Al Gore who invented the internet.) Or Robert Goddard with rocketry and that Jarvik guy with the artificial heart. Closer to home is Eric Buell's innovative designs, or Vaughn Beals who turned HD from a crumbling dinosaur to an economic powerhouse.
I think the differance now is that from an R&D standpoint corporations own everything, so technological and medical breakthroughs become successes for the such and such corp. instead of the individual who thought them up
Also the time period from the late 1800's to the early 1900's was the peak of the industral revolution, with improvements in metalurgy, tooling , electric power generation and petroleum distillation driven by the navel arms race between England and Germany, all combining with standardized manufacturing to enable ideas to be brought from paper to reality in a consistant manner.
The developed nations at that time where at the height of their evolution from an agrarian farm based economy to the modern industrialized world we live in today.