Crockford's story [1] behind the genesis of JSON is similar. Everything was already there, but he's the one who formalized it gave it an official home. That helped propel it to its current level of popularity. The fact that he didn't create javascript, the internet, the www, tcp, etc is not relevant.

[1] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/08/11/video-crockford-json/