Five Indian Scientists Who Remain in the Twilight

2. V A Shiva Ayyadurai - - Inventor of email

Mumbai-born child prodigy & scientist, V A Shiva Ayyadurai invented the email with an inbox at an early age of 14 for the interoffice mail system at Newark Dental School in 1978. This invention was exhibited prior to the false claims of creating an email by Ray Tomlinson, a renowned American computer programmer, who was actually the creator of a primitive form of text messaging. Shiva, in fact, began his research when his supervisor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson encouraged him to metamorphose the traditional paper-based interoffice and inter-organizational communication system into an effective electronic communication system. Eventually, he developed his software program ‘email’ embedded with features like inbox, outbox, drafts, memo, attachments, folders, compose, forward, reply, address book, groups, returns receipt, sorting and others, which outclassed it from similar forms of electronic communication. Shiva also came up with Express Mail Service (EMS) comprising e-mail and various other programs after this vigorous research. Despite the facts about Shiva and his research which came to the public eye in 2014, he is still one of the unsung heroes of India.