Many other contributions including Bose-Einstein effect that he would like consider secondary contributions, but have non the less have gone on to generate enormous research in the field (and lead to not a few noble prizes if that matters to people).
Heisenberg is probably the only one that can be honestly said to have made a profound discovery rivaling Einstein.
Just my two cents here.
Before Newton, physics used to be called natural philosophy. Newton made it tractable.
Before von Neumann, strategy was philosophy.
("But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.")
After von Neumann, strategy became tractable.
(Obviously, this view of history is very simplified.)
"Oh, Einstein wasn't special, if he didn't get it, the next guy would have. Check out these folks instead." Somehow not sensing the irony that if we all did then worship the other ones you're talking about, you or someone like you would then just make the same claims on those people.. that they're not special, it was about timing and luck.
It's really not about the achievements for some people. (You.) It's just about having a person who only an elite recognizes. You're part of that elite and you're smarter for it because you see this other person's specialness and the rest of the world doesn't and you're better than them for it.
Einstein was great and original and irreplaceable. Your need to have found something better than what the common man worships doesn't make the other heroes you come up with worth any more, or Einstein any less. You just gotta get over it.
So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper-focus on individual accomplishment was a more accurate perspective in our hunter-gatherer days; fewer people means that each person has a bigger relative impact.
I do have a specific opinion on what it means to learn form someone. People often overreach and obsess with details from the lives of those, when in reality learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories. This goes for many other geniuses -- they are geniuses in their fields, and we shouldn't expect everything they did to be right.
"If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicist about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds."
At the same time, I think you're also underestimating how much credit other physicists get. Anybody who has studied some physics knows how profound and significant Feynman, Maxwell, Dirac, Schrödinger, Landau, Pauli, Fermi, etc., all were. In fact, Feynman might get even more adoration among physics undergraduates than Einstein.
But Feynman's work on renormalizing quantum electrodynamics, while one of the great accomplishments of 20th century physics, still did not have the sheer impact of general relativity, which had such far-reaching and grand predictions about the cosmos that many of them took 50+ years to verify. Kip Thorne doesn't identify the "golden age" of GR as even beginning until 1960, when scientists were finally able to not only understand its implications better but also verify them.
Even today Einstein has some predictions that remain to be completely verified (e.g., gravitational waves).
This might be hard to prove. They'd have to have something comparable to Einstein's 1905 output, while working at some (dreary?) job to pay the bills. Maybe the Nobel (non-Peace) price isn't the best metric, but there are very few people with more than one and the 1905 work might have generated two that year...
It might be hagiography, but it seemed he had a clarity of thought that enabled asking the right question and no concern about what the answer might be. Most of us are prisoners of our world view, few are blessed with the ability to change it.
One exercise you can do is ask what recent discoveries could have been made 100 years earlier. Off-hand:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Graphene-Supercapacit...
"why wasn't this discovered 100 years earlier"? is very close to "why couldn't GR have been discovered 100 years later."
It was discovered via scotch tape and a block of graphite.
reference following http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene leads to,
"Scientists often find ingenious ways to attain their research objectives, even if that objective is a truly two-dimensional material that many physicists felt could not be grown. In 2003, one ingenious physicist took a block of graphite, some Scotch tape and a lot of patience and persistence and produced a magnificent new wonder material that is a million times thinner than paper, stronger than diamond, more conductive than copper. It is called graphene, and it took the physics community by storm when the first paper appeared the following year".
In point of fact, perhaps it could have happened in 1903. True, Scotch tape was invented in 1930 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_Tape
But, again, why couldn't it have been invented a bit earlier?
And so forth. The fact is, what we know from the circumstances is that GR is a "great person" contribution to the world at a specific historical time. If it had not happened then, it is not appropriate to say it surely would have happened soon.
graphene was imminent for decades until it was discovered. (Other ideas were imminent for hundreds of years in science. It really doesn't mean anything.)
Looking backward, it is pretty clear that there were lots of people coming up with the formulations for quantum mechanics. Even without Einstein, somebody probably would have handled that stuff.
However, general relativity was definitely ahead of its time. It took decades until we could even test it.
Finally, while Einstein "lost" the Bohr-Einstein debate about the nature of quantum mechanics, the problem was actually the experiments of the day. One of the strikes against Einstein was the fact that the field formulation predicts that excited electrons in atoms do not decay which everybody knew was an incorrect prediction. Except that Einstein WASN'T wrong--if you put an excited atom in a photon trap and isolate it from the rest of the universe it's decay time goes way up. See: "Collective Electrodynamics" by Carver Mead http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collective-electrodynamics
Looking at the same questions and reading same papers as his peers Einstein simply went further.
I can guess at least one: Nikola Tesla. May I ask you what other names do you have in mind?
BTW: I saw Asimov speak way back when I was in high school, circa 1981. He was great in person.
and though obvious, Newton is not to be sneezed at.
"In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians."
- Albert Einstein
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#cite_note-FOOTNOTE...
No idea how far up the totem pole that puts her.
Of course she was brilliant, and influential, but putting her in the same list as Newton or Einstein feels like intellectual hipsterdom.
Von Neumann.
Erdős.
Euler.
Einstein seems smarter because he was smarter. He didn't transform one small area of physics, he solved a lot of problems that were out at the edges and introduced new ideas that made them tractable.
Of course other people helped, and some of those other people might have created GR eventually.
But he was the only one to pull it all together.
In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity.
Which is why I think progress on the really hard problems has become glacial. Those problems always need deep creative insight, and math alone isn't enough.
I think because physics is now an industry in which deep creative insight is pretty worthless. For example, someone who could convince the gov't to award a $10 million grant to seek physical evidence of dark energy is likely going to have more success than a theorist who can show that dark energy is superfluous.
In Einstein's time physics was more like a hobby. An Einstein today, if they started as a patent clerk they'd more likely progress to IT than physics. At least in IT their creativity can be employed.
That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying.
The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality that scientific achievement, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom all lie on a multi-dimensional spectrum, they aren't innate, and like any skill, mathematics and scientific knowledge can be learned.
Even more so to say that there have been other geniuses at least at the level of Einstein who didn't land in the position of theoretical physics that afforded them the same level impact.
As for special relativity, based on the development of physics and mathematics of the time 1880-1910, I think it was a toss-up who would have discovered it if Einstein had actually fallen off that mountain in Switzerland in grade school and not been save by his classmate.